It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn't fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.

I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It's like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.

I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn't conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or "like native", ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.