There was a page in the early 2000s called the most annoying website in the world. It showed a very large (but finite: the site itself estimates 30-45 minutes) number of alerts. It also a prompt for your name and referred to you by your name.
At the time I knew only HTML so I was blown away by a web page "talking" to me, and by inspecting the source I learned about the script tag, alerts, prompts, loops and variables.
When it came out, the main browser was Internet Explorer, which became unresponsive until you got rid of all of the alerts. You could of course use Task Manager, or hold spacebar to go through them quickly, but most people didn't know that.
my favorite was this one which you can find here called Trojan.JS.YouAreAnIdiot [1]
The beauty of this one was how easy it was to customize and send to someone. The sheer terror people would go through thinking it was a targeted attack when the popup, bouncing everywhere flashing at them calling them an idiot, has their name and stuff in the javascript alert that came up... it was just incredibly funny, especially if you just set it as something that opened from putting it in their 'startup' menu with a couple of minutes at their computer
I distinctly remember switching to chrome, because using stumbleupon in it would only crash the tab, and not the whole browser. Kinda crazy to think that websites crashing the browser were common enough back then for that to matter.
By jove, I haven't seen this since primary school! It was perhaps 2003-2004, one of the other fellows had just learnt of it and he made each of us sit through it all. Since then, I have been searching for the lost legend.
A visit was much more annoying in IE6 on Windows 2000, which had no way to escape the dialogues.
I believe the original domain was "themostannoyingwebsiteintheworld.com". I would wager it is now either SEOspam or squatted.
There was far, FAR worse versions out there. The one that most stands out in my mind created an explosion of new pages, all of them loading the same sexualized images, at which point a WAV autoplays: "Hey, everyone! Look at ME! I'm looking at GAY PORN!!!!"
I remember one of these troll websites was one that displayed a picture of some James Bond like character. The entire window would then become "wavy", moving around the screen while it animates the waves, with of course the close buttons being totally unresponsive.
I wonder now how did those things work. I guess back in time browsers allowed you to do whatever you wanted with zero consequences?
AFAIK it's to do with how compositing was done in windows. Every app drew to the same surface. If it couldn't redraw because it was frozen or whatever, then you'd see the remnants of what was previously drawn, hence the pattern.
I had the same experience; "trick" websites like that got me so excited to find out what was possible. It's still kind of amazing that browsers let websites do all the things they do, considering the potential for abuse
Some actually see the constant flow of alerts, and ask if you want to supress alerts for that site. So, depending on how quickly you interact with that site, the browser might save you.
At the time I knew only HTML so I was blown away by a web page "talking" to me, and by inspecting the source I learned about the script tag, alerts, prompts, loops and variables.
When it came out, the main browser was Internet Explorer, which became unresponsive until you got rid of all of the alerts. You could of course use Task Manager, or hold spacebar to go through them quickly, but most people didn't know that.
Edit: holy smokes it's still up!
http://mr.g.graham.tripod.com/