WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.720 You ever just want to yell STOP IT at your web browser when it's acting up? 00:00:03.720 --> 00:00:07.620 Well there's actually a button that's supposed to get the browser to do exactly that. 00:00:07.620 --> 00:00:13.440 The STOP button. But if you've only ever used modern browsers, you might not even really have noticed it. 00:00:13.440 --> 00:00:18.760 It's typically a little X that occupies around the same space as the refresh button and disappears 00:00:18.760 --> 00:00:23.360 once the page is finished loading. But the STOP button is far from a modern invention. 00:00:23.360 --> 00:00:29.080 In fact, it was included in both Internet Explorer 1.0 and Netscape Navigator 1.0. 00:00:29.080 --> 00:00:33.880 And it was really important. Back then, the STOP button did pretty much what it does now. 00:00:33.880 --> 00:00:39.400 Stopped the web page from loading. But why exactly would you want that if you clicked on the link to begin with? 00:00:39.400 --> 00:00:44.040 Well back in the old days, we were all using those painfully slow 28 or 56K if you were 00:00:44.040 --> 00:00:49.080 lucky dial-up connections, meaning that web pages took a long time to load. 00:00:49.080 --> 00:00:54.000 And although plain text often loaded fairly quickly, images and gifs could take forever. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:59.440 We're talking like line by line. And sometimes, you just wanted to read the information on the page without all the messy 00:00:59.440 --> 00:01:05.200 graphics. The slow speeds of the time also meant that just trying to load one web page could saturate 00:01:05.200 --> 00:01:10.280 your connection. Not ideal if you were trying to download something in the background. 00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:17.840 Like spending two days on an appster song. Not to mention that poorly optimized web pages could easily crash the famously unstable 00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:22.800 Internet Explorer and even if that didn't happen, a page with lots of rich media could 00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:27.680 hog memory and CPU cycles, slowing down other things on your PC that weren't even related 00:01:27.680 --> 00:01:32.360 to the Internet, like making my solitaire end screen slow to an unceremonious stutter. 00:01:32.360 --> 00:01:36.960 The stop button was useful for getting problematic web pages to just stop what they were doing. 00:01:36.960 --> 00:01:40.480 But nowadays, high speed connections are the norm and our computers are usually powerful 00:01:40.480 --> 00:01:44.320 enough to handle a whole bunch of complex pages at once without breaking a sweat. 00:01:44.320 --> 00:01:47.480 So the stop button has declined in importance. 00:01:47.480 --> 00:01:51.640 But have you noticed that if you do try to use it, it's often the case that nothing 00:01:51.640 --> 00:01:56.920 seems to happen. Okay, the reason that the stop button often doesn't seem to do much is because it's 00:01:56.920 --> 00:02:04.120 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. 00:02:04.120 --> 00:02:12.040 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. 00:02:12.040 --> 00:02:15.720 The stop button can stop the HTML itself from loading. 00:02:15.720 --> 00:02:19.640 Or if that's already done, stop the browser from fetching additional resources it needs 00:02:19.640 --> 00:02:27.280 like the aforementioned images. The problem is that modern web pages are made up of much more than just bare HTML. 00:02:27.280 --> 00:02:31.880 Instead, most of them also run scripts that do everything from enabling custom web page 00:02:31.880 --> 00:02:36.800 layouts to processing information that you enter to serving you advertisements. 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:41.200 Oh boy. These scripts are basically programs that run inside your browser. 00:02:41.200 --> 00:02:45.920 And as such, browsers don't want to just terminate them suddenly as this could break 00:02:45.920 --> 00:02:50.520 much of the page's functionality or make the browser process itself unstable. 00:02:50.520 --> 00:02:56.000 Instead, the stop button more or less makes your browser politely ask running scripts 00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:00.320 to stop what they're doing when they can if it's not too much trouble, please. 00:03:00.320 --> 00:03:06.800 Kind of like a letter from the United Nations. But that doesn't mean the stop button is completely useless. 00:03:06.800 --> 00:03:11.200 It can sometimes still stop really irritating web page elements from interfering with the 00:03:11.200 --> 00:03:14.920 content you actually want, such as paywalls. 00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:18.520 As long as you can hit the stop button at exactly the right time. 00:03:18.520 --> 00:03:21.760 But you might have better luck at the county fair. 00:03:21.760 --> 00:03:26.080 Thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with 00:03:26.080 --> 00:03:32.320 your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future. Do you guys actually use the stop button? 00:03:32.320 --> 00:03:35.400 How often do you use the stop button, like once a year, once a month?