The life and death of Sloppy (the slow proxy)

Sloppy was a piece of software to slow your browser, to simulate a dial-up modem experience when dial-up was a thing. It died a while back, and you don’t need it as browsers have this sort of thing built-in and more.

It became public knowledge around 2009. I created it because I was working at a publisher and marketing were keen on putting a lot of banners on the website, which ruined everything (I exaggerate). The design team had to find a phone line, plug in a modem, find the dial-up details, discover the bill hadn’t been paid—all to try to see what a customer might be experiencing.

I had this “vision” of going into the publisher’s office, clicking a button to launch a modem-slow version of the website, and saying to her: “There. See what you’ve done!?”. Which I did, and they didn’t care. But it was a fun piece of technology to play with.

Java Web Start was that technology. It was a sandboxed browser integration such that you could click a link to an “app” (as we’d call it now), and it would download and launch. No manual installation, you see, which was a big deal.

So that’s what I made. What it did was present a text box for you to type in a web address, and it would open a browser window not directly to the site, but it would very slowly feed the content of the site to your browser.

It did an adequate job for some people. And others felt "this is another piece of shet..." which made me chuckle finding it again after all this time. 

The project was killed by Java Web Start being abandoned in 2017. But even before then, I was relying on free code signing, and that had become a right pain.

It had a brief write-up in a magazine called PC Pro, which was a surprise.

Obviously nobody paid for this software (to a rough approximation), but I was delighted that Joanna Kleinschmidt designed a smashing logo for it.