You ever just want to yell STOP IT at your web browser when it's acting up?
Well there's actually a button that's supposed to get the browser to do exactly that.
The STOP button. But if you've only ever used modern browsers, you might not even really have noticed it.
It's typically a little X that occupies around the same space as the refresh button and disappears
once the page is finished loading. But the STOP button is far from a modern invention.
In fact, it was included in both Internet Explorer 1.0 and Netscape Navigator 1.0.
And it was really important. Back then, the STOP button did pretty much what it does now.
Stopped the web page from loading. But why exactly would you want that if you clicked on the link to begin with?
Well back in the old days, we were all using those painfully slow 28 or 56K if you were
lucky dial-up connections, meaning that web pages took a long time to load.
And although plain text often loaded fairly quickly, images and gifs could take forever.
We're talking like line by line. And sometimes, you just wanted to read the information on the page without all the messy
graphics. The slow speeds of the time also meant that just trying to load one web page could saturate
your connection. Not ideal if you were trying to download something in the background.
Like spending two days on an appster song. Not to mention that poorly optimized web pages could easily crash the famously unstable
Internet Explorer and even if that didn't happen, a page with lots of rich media could
hog memory and CPU cycles, slowing down other things on your PC that weren't even related
to the Internet, like making my solitaire end screen slow to an unceremonious stutter.
The stop button was useful for getting problematic web pages to just stop what they were doing.
But nowadays, high speed connections are the norm and our computers are usually powerful
enough to handle a whole bunch of complex pages at once without breaking a sweat.
So the stop button has declined in importance.
But have you noticed that if you do try to use it, it's often the case that nothing
seems to happen. Okay, the reason that the stop button often doesn't seem to do much is because it's
not actually designed to stop all activity on a web page. You see, HTML, the language that web pages are written in, is pretty simple.
It tells the browser where to put text, links, and graphics. And it also provides the addresses where the browser can grab elements like sound and images.
The stop button can stop the HTML itself from loading.
Or if that's already done, stop the browser from fetching additional resources it needs
like the aforementioned images. The problem is that modern web pages are made up of much more than just bare HTML.
Instead, most of them also run scripts that do everything from enabling custom web page
layouts to processing information that you enter to serving you advertisements.
Oh boy. These scripts are basically programs that run inside your browser.
And as such, browsers don't want to just terminate them suddenly as this could break
much of the page's functionality or make the browser process itself unstable.
Instead, the stop button more or less makes your browser politely ask running scripts
to stop what they're doing when they can if it's not too much trouble, please.
Kind of like a letter from the United Nations. But that doesn't mean the stop button is completely useless.
It can sometimes still stop really irritating web page elements from interfering with the
content you actually want, such as paywalls.
As long as you can hit the stop button at exactly the right time.
But you might have better luck at the county fair.
Thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with
your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future. Do you guys actually use the stop button?
How often do you use the stop button, like once a year, once a month?