Evolution of the Web

The Commercial Internet Begins

Nov 19, 1989

Previously a private government system, the Internet was first served to the public through commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Massachusetts-based ISP The World served its first internet customer in November 1989.

HTML 1.0

Dec 19, 1990

Working for CERN, Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML as a means of accessing data on another computer over the web. HTML 1.0 had only 22 tags, and was very basic; only really used internally

WorldWideWeb Browser (aka Nexus)

Dec 19, 1990

The first web browser and editor sprang into existence from the brain of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

CERN httpd Server

Dec 19, 1990

CERN httpd was the first web server and was developed by Tim Berners-Lee to go along with his development of WorldWideWeb, HTTP, and HTML.

HTTP 0.9

Dec 19, 1991

The first conception of HTTP, it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and always served and HTML page. It's only request type was GET.

ViolaWWW Browser

Mar 9, 1992

Developed by Pei-Yuan Wei, it made significant graphical improvements to web browsing, such as hyperlinks as well as bookmarking. It became the most popular browser, but was limited to the X Window System. However, it had advanced features that surpassed HTML 3.0, such as applets and interactivity.

Erwise Browser

Apr 15, 1992

While one of the first web browsers with a GUI, Finnish student developed Erwise, was not able to supplant Nexus and was shadowed by the also graphical ViolaWWW.

Mosaic Browser (to become Netscape Navigator)

Jan 23, 1993

Took the web browsing space by storm! It was developed by NCSA, and introduced a number of convenient features such as a URL bar, forward/back/reload buttons, and other interactivity.

WorldWideWeb (Nexus) Source Code Released

Apr 30, 1993

The release of the Nexus source to the public domain made it easier for other developers to learn how to make and use web browsers.

IIS (Internet Information Services) Server

May 30, 1995

IIS is Microsoft's proprietary web server software and used by Windows Server by default. IIS has had a number of web security vulnerabilities, and it was found that a particularly large number of servers hosting malware are using IIS.

Internet Explorer Browser

Aug 16, 1995

IE overthrew the existing browser king at the time (Netscape Navigator), largely due to it being included with the Windows operating system. It's development stemmed from Windows licensing the Mosaic web browser's code. However, they did not charge customers for IE since it was bundled free with the Windows OS, they did not pay any royalties to Spyglass Inc. (Mosaic). Over the years, IE has had many iterations, and is currently on IE 11.

HTML 2.0

Nov 24, 1995

At this point, HTML became an accepted standard, but still not widespread. HTML 2.0 made basic improvements over v1.0.

Apache HTTP Server

Dec 19, 1995

Apache was the first widely popular web server software. It is still the most popular web server in-use today, due to the wide range of technologies that have been built around and upon Apache, such as the popular LAMP software bundle. In general, Apache prioritizes latency over throughput, that is providing a slower, but more consistent, delivery speed.

HTTP 1.0/1.1

Jan 19, 1996

Dave Raggett added new HTTP features, a security protocol, and header and methods fields. HTTP 1.0 add POST, and HTTP 1.1 add OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, and CONNECT request types. HTTP 1.1 achieved popularity rather quickly, being supported by 65% of websites within a matter of months.

Opera Browser

Dec 19, 1996

Starting with version 2.0, Opera has had small but dedicated support over the years. It's had it's greatest successes on mobile devices, being the 3rd most popular mobile browser and installed on Nintendo gaming systems.

HTML 3.0/3.2

Jan 19, 1997

HTML 3.0 was scrapped, and HTML 3.2 became the standard W3C Recommendation (it was developed exclusively by them too...). Math markup was removed from HTML, and Netscape's visual markup tags were adopted.

HTML 4.0

Dec 21, 1997

Over the years, HTML 4.0 became a web standard; a part of practically every website. Practically no development was made on HTML 4.0, after 2000, as W3C was focused on XHTML, which ultimately fizzled out.

IPv6 Standardized

Dec 19, 1998

Due to the growing popularity of the internet, the 4.2 billion IP addresses afforded by IPv4, are expected to be used up in the near future. The number of bytes used to represent an IP address is changed from 32-bit to 128-bit. The result is 3.403×10^38 available IP addresses.

Nginx Server

Aug 6, 2002

Nginx (pronounced "engine X") is an HTTP server that is meant to be light-weight, fast, and able to handle concurrency. Due to it's complexity and a lack of supporting technologies, Nginx has had limited popularity among most web developers. However, for sites and web services that need exceptionally high performance, Nginx a popular choice.

Firefox Browser

Sep 23, 2002

Developed by the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox was the first wildly popular open source browser. It's support for user-developed plug-ins makes it the most customizeable browser to-date.

Safari Browser

Jan 7, 2003

The Safari browser was developed by Apple and is based off of the WebKit engine. Similar to Internet Explorer, Safari achieved success due to it being bundled with the OS X (Mac) and iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad) operating systems.

Google Chrome Browser

Sep 2, 2008

Exploding onto the browser scene in 2008, Google's Chrome browser has steadily grown to become the most popular web browser. Like Firefox, it is open-source (partially) and has a robust plug-in extension system. In fact, it was originally developed by former Mozilla employees. Tieing in Chrome to Google's other services such as Gmail, Youtube, and Google Docs, helped Chrome to supplant itself as the browser utility-belt. The use of V8, Google's custom JavaScript engine, makes it #1 performer

Node.js Server

May 27, 2009

While not exclusive to web server software, Node.js made waves in the web server scene. Node.js enables servers to be created using JavaScript, giving them finer control than with Apache. Because front-end development is primarily in JavaScript, many companies, including Paypal, have switched to using Node.js to reduce the amount of translation needed between front-end and back-end developers.

HTML 5.0

May 20, 2011

By this point, video and audio had become exceedingly common on the internet, and HTML had little or no direct support for them. Coinciding with the growing popularity of mobile browsing, HTML 5.0 garnered a lot of hype. However, it's sub-par performance, especially in regards to audio, left many developers and companies disappointed. Despite the rocky start, HTML 5.0 has become widely accepted, as it does offer significant improvements over the old HTML 4.0.