alt Hacker NewsNetworking, as we all know, is a rats nest of complexity and edge cases. I think software started getting worse when a high speed internet connection became a given.
90s software ran mostly offline. It was simpler and more deterministic. I think that's why it felt more reliable. Your UI couldn't depend on laggy server round-trips. Things either worked or they didn't.
Yes, absolutely. I don't recall Winamp ever crashing on me (maybe after they introduced frame-breaking skins), meanwhile Apple Music needs to be restarted at least once a day. At the same time my local music server has been up for months without an issue. It's not really an issue of quality it's an issue of inconsistency with network state, which a lot of apps seems to want to make even worse by now passing their networked state to another AI process.