"If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content"
Crazy wild assumptions given that the web was brand-spanking-new and changing rapidly and unpredictably by the day. I'll never understand these needlessly-minimalist perspectives on interacting with the internet (yeah, I'm talking to you no-JavaScript folks). That approach only result in you missing out on things, and that was even more true in the 90's.
It's easy to forget that 1999 was still firmly in the dial-up modem days. This was as much about practicality as it was about principles: every second spent loading a website would very literally cost you money, so any policy that would let you cut the process of finding worth-while content short, in an even remotely efficient manner, was a sensible thing to do.
Today, almost 25 years later, not even turning your phone or computer on will cost you just as much in ISP monthlies as it costs to load the heaviest, client-side-JS-generated, 4x resolution image websites nonstop all day every day.
We used to have a slightly better reason to prefer lean, content-first web pages than we do today.
Crazy wild assumptions given that the web was brand-spanking-new and changing rapidly and unpredictably by the day. I'll never understand these needlessly-minimalist perspectives on interacting with the internet (yeah, I'm talking to you no-JavaScript folks). That approach only result in you missing out on things, and that was even more true in the 90's.