[cdogl]

> I would find one of these computers and click around until I got a Best Viewed In badge. (It was often on the Help page.) That would bypass the restrictions of the single-site browser and take you to e.g. netscape.com, where you could find a link to a search engine and browse wherever you wanted.

I’m not familiar with a “Best Viewed In” badge and I am intrigued as to how this bypass worked (based on my own 2000s high school experiences of working around restrictions). Would appreciate if any passersby could elaborate.

[avarun]

It linked to the browser’s website. The only actual restriction on these computers was usually that you couldn’t access the address bar to type in arbitrary URLs.

[bsimpson]

I don't remember the specific restrictions, but I remember that you could only click links that were on the allowed site.

So if you tried to go to example.com, you would be redirected to bank.com. But if a link on bank.com got you to example.com, you could visit it that way.

Obviously address bars are one of the restricted things. I feel like there might have been others, but I don't recall the specifics.

[treflop]

These sites just didn’t link to any other site that had anything cool. And you couldn’t type in your own link obviously.

Except when they slapped on that badge, it linked to netscape.com which had a search engine.

[batch12]

If I remember correctly, these were href images used to recommend a specific browser for the best experience.

[gattilorenz]

Indeed. They were small images (https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/iv8hgg/the_netsc...) at the bottom of webpages linking you to netscape.com/microsoft.com so you could download the browser “recommended” (or targeted) by the page creator. These icons were usually a standard size (88x31 px?).

Wikipedia explains the context in whoch these were born a bit more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars