The web today resembles our universe with a huge number of interlinked web pages and web apps, with videos, photos, and interactive content. What the average user doesn’t see is the interplay of web technologies and browsers that makes all this possible. Over a time web technologies have evolved to give web developers the ability to create new generations of useful and immersive web experiences. Today’s web is a result of the ongoing efforts of an open web community that helps define these web technologies, like HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL and ensure that they’re supported in all web browsers.
The chrome team had designed a nice story of the evolution of web using simple animation. Most of the technologies are described with the original old screenshots and descriptions. The read more link navigates you to the corresponding Wikipedia page. The color bands in this visualization represent the interaction between web technologies and browsers, which brings to life the many powerful web apps that we use daily.
As a user of web technologies from 2000, I enjoyed the story very much. The screenshot of the old browsers brings those old memories into my brain. The story of web starts in 1990 with the invention of HTTP (a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems), in 1991 HTML 1.0 (Hyper Text Markup Language) came, in 1994 the Mosaic browser came into the existence, in December 15, 1994 Netscape V.1 was released, and the story continues….
My computer experience started in 1995 in some computers having a black and white monitor. In my college days I introduced to internet and used Internet explorer to surf internet in a browsing center in 2000.In the year 2003 I obtained a dial-up (56kbps) connection in my home and to browse internet I used Netscape V7.1, which was released in June 30, 2003. The last version of Netscape V.9 was released on October 15, 2007. The Netscape used the Cookies method to store state information to user’s browser.
Opera V.1 was released in April 1, 1995. At the time, I was also used another fast web browser Opera V.6, which was released in December 18,2001. In January 28, 2003 Opera V.7 was released. At that time Opera was a paid software. The V.7 comes with a nice looking blue color glossy interface. At that time, it was one of the best browser available, it offered good speed and also a good interface to navigate around. If my memory is sharp, Opera is the first browser offering tabbed interface. By the time other web browsers open each page separately, which is inconvenient to use. At the time, I have a slow internet connection ( a dial up 56kbps) in my home. So I mostly depend on the Opera browser’s tabbed interface, which helped to read a page at the same time other tabs are downloading the page that I had given. It saved a lot of time and money!
Internet explorer came into existence in August 16, 1995. I had used IE V.5.5, the browser appears a bit slower than Opera. I still remember its history icon of IE V.5.5, which looks like a knob. Then I used IE V.6.Then I used Safari, then Firefox and finally Chrome and stick at it. Chrome delighted me with its page loading speed, which makes me to mark it as the default browser till 2011. 2011 is the year of browser war. All major browsers made a whole change, improved it’s performance and changed it’s interface. By the time some other browsers (nice browser-I loved it’s GUI-really best interface design) like flock discontinued and disappeared.
You can watch the complete story of the evolution of web from http://goo.gl/Y55FO. What’s your opinion about the animated story? Did you have any experience in those old browsers? Can you compare it with modern browsers?
