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One thing that has amazingly never improved for 20 years. That's when your internet connection does not work. It could be anything from:

1. your computer broke 2. your network/wifi card failed 3. your wifi access point failed 4. your hub/switch failed 5. your router failed 6. your cable modem failed 7. your ISP failed 8. the URL you were trying to reach failed

The error message you get is just a generic one with no clue at all.



My pet peeve is HTTPS/SSL errors when your clock is off (usually caused by a dead battery and your device time resetting to 1970). Breaks pretty much all network services on your machine, and absolutely no software tells you it's because your time is completely unreasonable.


Google Chrome actually will tell you about your clock settings I believe?


In contrast, compiler errors are becoming better and better every day. And where they became cumbersome and unhelpful (e.g. C++ via GCC), competition helped: Either through other programming langauges (e.g. OCaml, Rust), or through other compilers for the same language (e.g. C++ via Clang).


Surely it's one of the most popular errors too.

I've always thought something like a traceroute that shows the blockage (like how CloudFront does when an origin server goes down).


I have been wondering about that too. Does the computer have enough information that I give a better error message in this case?


9. DNS query failed. This often happens with wifi networks that first hijack the connection show their login / ToS




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