[userbinator]

I want to log into my bank to see how much money I have.

The most infuriating part is that this is perfectly doable with 90s web technology. Even encryption was already available in the form of SSL, and that's arguably the only thing which has improved since then. The majority of technological "progress" has merely been the reinvention of existing technology in more inefficient ways.

[pjmlp]

In the 90's many banks would make you install a variant of Java applet, ActiveX or Flash, to log into their systems.

In the name of a "better experience".

I know, because that is exactly what many of our customers did on the agency I worked during those days.

[nayuki]

I was too young to have a bank account back then. However, I can personally attest that the Toronto Public Library, around year 2000+/-2, had a Java applet on their public website which the general public used to search the library's catalog. I may or may not have saved a snapshot of one of those JAR files. Needless to say, the Java applet was awkward compared to a properly designed web application - e.g. loading screens, weird widgets that were neither web nor Windows, inability to select text by default, inability to use the web browser's UI controls (e.g. back/forward/reload/URL-bar).