you're sitting in the middle of a beautiful forest. birds are chirping, but it's still quieter than you remembered outside could be, living in a city as you have most of your life, and when the sun goes down, you'll remember what stars look like. you relax, sighing more softly than you need to, then silence envelops you once again. in your left ear, you hear an internet explorer navigation click

my favorite part about this bit is that if you're under 30 you almost certainly won't get the actual cosmic horror of it

okay here's the explanation

Back in 1998, even though modern, stable web browsers didn't exist and the term webapp did not exist (or referred to serverside stuff mostly written in ASP) the concept of the Awful WebView App was already in full swing. the distinctions vs now were

1. They mostly used activex instead of JavaScript
2. Instead of simply meaning that an app is going to be crappier that had to be, it almost universally meant that the app in question was one you didn't want to use at all (fucking joystick driver), or in fact was commercial malware (Norton Antivirus)
3. they didn't. Work

but the other thing is that they all used Internet Explorer's COM embed object, because chromium hadn't been invented yet. And the thing about IE is that every single time you clicked a link or otherwise navigated to a different page, it played an utterly unnecessary clik noise. we all hated it, and app devs who used this technique never turned the sound off, because - even more so than now - the fact that an app was Just A Webpage was a 100% guarantee that the developers were bottom dollar incompetents making software under duress for a company that felt nothing but malice for its users (Symantec, Mcafee)

so you'd invariably end up with some miserable piece of sludge running on your machine that you couldn't get rid of, or couldn't even identify since it was some hidden process installed by a driver, and for God knows what reason, they would occasionally decide to reload the hidden web view. and you'd just hear

clik

and wonder how the fuck a browser could be open, or what on earth it had just done

PS: you have to understand that at the time, even for those of us who had always on internet, it was really not normal or at all comfortable to think about your computer doing stuff that you hadn't explicitly asked it to do. I just thought you should have that context. It wasn't always like this.