[colanderman]

These absolutely existed. Image-heavy pages for which designers didn't specify the image size in HTML (i.e. many/most pages) jumped like crazy as the images slowly loaded over a modem. Maybe no auto-playing videos, but auto playing GIFs, MIDI files, and Java applets(!) were common, not to mention <marquee> and <blink> tags.

Heck, I was about to joke about cookie banners not being a thing -- but they sort of were, as they had just been invented (1994 [1]), and any site which relied on them inevitably had some prominent text exhorting you to use a browser which supported them (whether you already were or not). (Or frames -- the very first web page I visited -- nintendo.com -- I was greeted with Cranky Kong lecturing me about frame support.) This was of course right next to the ubiquitous "best viewed in Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer" badge.

Oh and don't forget the toolbar plugins. Anyone from the cohort for whom the phrase "eternal September" was invented to describe had between 3-7 of these in their browser, each one taking up another half inch of real estate. So top to bottom you'd have:

* title bar

* menu bar

* (enormous) navigation bar

* bookmark toolbar

* AOL toolbar

* Yahoo! toolbar

* Ask Jeeves toolbar

* Bonzi Buddy toolbar or some other spyware

* anti-spyware toolbar

* web page

* horizontal scroll bar

* status bar

* Windows dock

And the web page itself was often divided up into multiple frames (for ads or navigation or just by accident), each with their own scroll bars because they'd be just a pixel too large to fit in their allotted space. Probably only a 1/4 of the full screen real estate would actually show content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#History