[Obligatory Futurama Quote] Thanks to the internet, I’m now bored of sex[/OFQ]
There are some things that, just because they CAN be done on the Internet, doesn’t mean they SHOULD be done. I’m talking about web pages with musical introductions. Web sites are meant to be seen, not heard. Also, I have seen web pages that use fades, wipes, dissolves, etc. when clicking between links. It’s a neat eye candy effect-- for about two minutes-- then it gets tiresome.
In IE, I use the right click on links to open them in a seperate window. I do this because the screen I’m looking at often still has stuff I want to view. I hate it when a site disables the right click because they are under the mistaken impression that they are preventing me from stealing their content. If I wanted their content, disabling the right click wouldn’t keep me from getting it.
In that case, use SHIFT + left click to open the link in a new window.
Most of my pet hates have already been covered. In no particular order they are:
Music
Animated gubbins that follows the cursor around the screen
Buggy Javascript
Those floating menu things that slide down the page as you scroll, but take a while to catch up if you scroll down too fast.
Flash animations
Non-resizable text
What? No one mentioned registration? What a PAIN in the butt it is to have to register to read a news story from a paper that I won’t likely ever read again. If you’re going to CHARGE for your content and REQUIRE me to register, that’s fine. That is your business. But, the annoying FREE registration drives me crazy.
Most annoying…some kind of re-director called errorplace…errRRRR. It took about 2 months to get rid of it, and don’t ask me how. Now that I’ve typed this I’ll hit submit and there it will be asking me to download cursors. This thing was more annoying than adware.
How about “people who say internet when they mean web”? Lots of things annoy me about the www but I didn’t interpret the OP to be asking about that specifically.
Web-specific gripes:
•totally unnecessary flash, java, or (worst yet) platform-specific or browser-specific code when plain-vanilla HTML would have worked just as well. test your damn pages under something other than Internet Explorer for Windows, especially if you’re selling something!
• navigation that only works if you allow links to open new windows. c’mon, most of us don’t, thanks to popup ads, so now we have to re-enable it just for your freakin’ site?
• information encoded in RealPlayer or Windows Media format that could’ve been encoded as mpeg or even as .gif or .jpeg files instead, especially if you’ve encumbered access to it in a java wrapper so the files can’t be downloaded if they won’t play properly in our browsers. some PC users probably feel the same way about QuickTime, btw.
Number 1 - with a -bullet- (one I’d like to be able to use …) has got to be Spam email. The most flagrant (for me at least) are the porn site ones, but now my spamblocker routinely picks up prescription med ones as well as the various money scam ones. Whatever, they’re all equally bad.
Nipping at the heels of the spam email would be all the excess, extoraneous “junk” that some web designers feel they -must- add to their pages. Sad to say, but many of the newspaper sites fall into this category. Sometimes, those sites cause my computer to crash or freeze up, leading to a hard reboot. I’ve noticed too, since the advent of pop-up blockers, some ads have gotten tricky and gone to pop -under- insert rolling eyes smiley here
Lastly, sites that you hve to download something extra to be able to view properly. An additional bonus here is that invariably you’ll get a message giving you an “approximate” download time (for dial-up, usually at 56K) which also invariably turns out to be as huge LIE, and it takes 2-3 times longer to download.
That’s all the gripes that come to mind for now … 
Cool tip. Thanks! 
AHunter3
I’ve been on the Internet (or is it the World Wide Web?) for over 7 years now and I was wondering if you could explain the subtle distinctions between the two?
While I’m at it - here’s another gripe
Java Applet Loading
Attention webmasters - stop using Java Applets because
- They never load
- They take too long to load
- When they are through loading, they don’t work
- When they are through loading it is for something that was NOT worth the wait.
wolfmeister
::looks up carefully for wooshing things flying overhead::
Umm, if you’re serious…
• email is an internet phenomenon; but with the exception of folks using hotmail and google mail and other web mail, email does not utilize the web at all. A standard email URL looks like this: mailto:ahunter3@earthlink.net (because of the way our board works I don’t think that will be interpreted as a clickable URL though).
• newsgroups, or usenet if you prefer, is another internet protocol. again, with the exception of a few web sites that are set up as gateway interfaces to the world of newsgroups, usenet doesn’t utilize the web at all. A standard usenet, or newsgroup URL looks like this: nntp://alt.fans.cecil-adams Usenet, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a hierarchy of posting domains and subdivisions thereof and so on down to the individual groupname; new posts are distributed to the various servers used by ISPs and from there individuals download (“subscribe”) and read the headers and, if interested, the full body of the messages, and can reply; their replies are picked up and made available to all the various servers for other subscribing readers will have access to them.
• telnet is an older internet phenomenon, still in existence but largely supplanted by more secure forms that do much the same thing, such as ssh. Both telnet and ssh connect your computer to another as a logon session on a command line. In the old days before GUIs of any sort were common, this let you run useful programs from a remote computer. There are also ways of connecting and then designating your own monitor as the place to pipe the video and running a remote X-Window graphical environment —your own unique session but with mouse and icons and the whole works. An ssh URL would look something like this —ssh://username:password@192.168.1.19 The world wide web isn’t used for ssh. (Or telnet).
• gopher is an older internet phenomenon, too, one that’s pretty much fallen by the wayside (don’t hear much about it nowadays). In the era before web browsers, gopher was your search engine system.
• another oldie but still resilient and very much in use as an internet protocol is FTP. FTP is file transfer protocol, the means of transferring files from one computer to another. It also lets you create folders on the remote machine, rename files, delete folders or files, and so on, but not run processes (i.e., unlike telnet or ssh, you can’t launch the remote computer’s copy of vi or pico and edit files). If you have “personal web space” free with your email account from your ISP, as I do, and you maintain a web site in it, you probably use FTP to move your web files up from your local machine after designing them. An ftp url looks like this: ftp://ftp.hawaii.edu
• meanwhile, newer protocols and uses for the internet have come into being, some of them newer than the web. the database program FileMaker has its own proprietary protocol for opening remote databases from a local copy of the program, using an URL like this: fmp5://fps.domino.org/main.fp5 Others, like Timbuktu and Windows Remote Desktop and Terminal Services, do not necessarily have an URL-scheme but they still connect by IP and create a way of communicating with a remote computer.
The world wide web is just one protocol among many, one particular type of communication between machines over the internet. The web uses hypertext transfer protocol, or http, to download a special kind of text file from the requested address, a type of text marked up in hypertext markup language, or html, whereby little codes embedded in the text tell the client software how to format the text, including how to embed a link from some specifically marked-up text to another web location.
Billions of web pages and nothing’s ever on!
StG
I just checked them all too and you right. Tonight is CRAP!
Someday, somebody is going to have to do something about dead links on all the search engines. Otherwise, they will all become next-to-useless.
There’s a way to make employment! Google et.al. could hire people to sit at a computer all day and search the web for dead links and remove them.
Nah, it’ll never happen.
It’s the Inner-net, get it right!!! 
Remember the good old days when they didn’t know how to direct you to a website? They would say, “Point your browser at”, or “Surf to”, now they say, “Log on to”, which really doesn’t make since, but it has become the standard.
And they didn’t know how to give you directions, “H-T-T-P colon forward-slash forward-slash W-W-W dot N-B-C dot com”. Heh, hey bub, N-B-C.com will do the job.
Yeah, and sites that used to be free, but now you have to pay. Ooops, did I say that?
Just think if we still had to deal with 300 baud modems that dropped the connection every 2 minutes. Hey honey, I’m loading the USA Today website so I can read it when I get home tonight.
Spyware, their credo must be, “It many be annoying, but it’s not illegal, so we’re going to do it”. Do they realize how many people would like to crush their servers (and their tiny little pointed heads) with a baseball bat? I think they do. I hope some day they will make it illegal for someone to load an executable on your system without your approval, but those days are probably far off in the future.
Nitpick: Gopher was more like a text-only version of the Web than a “search engine”. Different gopher servers would offer different content. I believe that the common was of searching the gopherspace was called “veronica”, but I can’t for the life of me remember if veronica was a gopher site like google is a web site, or if it was its own program.
-lv
My biggest gripe is web pages that only work in Internet Explorer.
Even the page you’re looking at right now doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The search link at the top of the page is supposed to pop up a “quick search” window, but it only works in IE.
I HATE having to constantly switch back and forth between browsers, but IE just doesn’t cut it for me. I use Mozilla most of the time and bring up IE when necessary (which happens way too often).
I thought the “hits returned” consisted not of files that were formatted to be viewed only by a “gopher browser” but were rather text files and binary files and whatnot that were on servers’ hard disks and which you could subsequently download to your own if it were what you were looking for. So you’d do a Veronica search for “SFVol” and from the hits returned would pick one and download it and thereby have for yourself a copy of “SFVol.hqx” on your own hard drive, and after decoding it you’d have the SFVol INIT for your own use. Or you’d do a Veronica search for “Good Times” and from the hits returned would pick the “Good Times FAQ.txt” and download it to read or print or forward to other people the story behind the Good Times virus hoax.
I could be wrong, it’s been eons and I didn’t use it much even then.
You, my friend, need BugMeNot, try googling it.
I agree, and I thought I’d mention that there is an extension or plug-in for Mozilla that will help alleviate this problem. It adds an “open link in IE” and “open page in IE” to the right-click menu. It’s handy as you can just do that instead of having to stop browsing, open IE, copy over the URL, and so on, if you unexpectedly hit a page that is IE-only.