ARPANET goes live, the precursor to the modern internet.

TCP/IP becomes the standard protocol, enabling a truly connected internet.

Larry Wall created Perl, originally as a text-processing language.

IRC was invented by Jarkko Oikarinen.

Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web (WWW) at CERN.

James Gosling created Oak for Sun Microsystems, later named Java.

Tim Berners-Lee creates the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) and the first website.

The first image is uploaded to the web (a parody band photo of CERN staff).

Mosaic browser launches, bringing images inline with text - a huge leap in UX.

CGI was introduced. It was the very first way to make dynamic websites.

Netscape Navigator dominates; Yahoo! and Amazon launch.

First online credit card transaction and first album sold online via encrypted card: Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales.

Pizza Hut introduced the first online pizza ordering.

JavaScript is created by Brendan Eich in 10 days; Netscape 2 ships with it. Originally Mocha → LiveScript → JavaScript.

Coincidentally, Java was called Oak until 1995.

The adult industry widely adopts online credit card payments, helping normalize e-commerce.

Rasmus Lerdorf created "Personal Home Page Tools," later renamed PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

The 1.0 version of Internet Explorer is released.

ASP/IIS introduced.

GeoCities launches, letting anyone host personal webpages in themed "neighbourhoods."

Tripod starts as a student community and grows into a homepage builder.

Angelfire offers free homepage hosting, later acquired by Lycos.

Xoom provides free unlimited hosting with banner ads, pioneering ad-supported hosting.

FortuneCity emerges with a virtual "city" theme for personal sites.

MSN HomePages and AOL Hometown bring homepage creation to mainstream internet users.

WYSIWYG tools like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver let non-coders build websites with drag-and-drop editors.

Open-source CMS rise: Drupal, Joomla, Magento.

Shopify launches, democratizing online stores for small businesses.

Squarespace and Wix popularize drag-and-drop site builders for non-developers.

Opera browser launches in Norway; known for speed and innovation (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, mouse gestures, integrated search).

CSS is introduced by Håkon Wium Lie, separating content from presentation.

Browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer; IE wins dominance by bundling with Windows.

HTML 4.0 standardizes markup.

First online crowdfunding - Marillion, to finance a tour.

First major artist to release an album digitally - David Bowie.

Flash gains traction for animations, video, and interactivity.

Napster popularizes peer-to-peer music sharing.

Sun Microsystems launched JSP.

LAMP Stack rises in popularity.

Adult sites were early adopters of embedded video players (RealPlayer, WMP, QuickTime, later Flash).

Phoenix browser (later Firefox) is released, focusing on speed, standards, and extensions.

Apple Safari is introduced as default for macOS, replacing Internet Explorer for Mac.

Firefox 1.0 launches, gaining market share as an open, standards-compliant IE alternative.

GSAP (GreenSock) becomes a pro-grade JS animation toolkit.

Three.js brings developer-friendly 3D on top of WebGL.

CSS3 animations/transforms replace many Flash-era effects natively.

Text-based BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) popular in the 1980s and early 1990s via dial-up.

As the web grew, forums moved online with WWWBoard and early CGI-driven scripts.

UBB.classic, vBulletin, phpBB (2000), and SMF (2003) standardize features like threads, avatars, moderation, themes.

Forums become central hubs (gaming, coding, fandoms) with signatures, PMs, polls, stickies, skins - proto-social networks.

Archie becomes the first search engine, indexing FTP sites.

Early web search tools: ALIWEB, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite.

Yahoo! Directory launches, initially human-curated.

Ask Jeeves introduces natural language queries.

AltaVista and HotBot push full-text search; niche engines like Astalavista.box.sk index cracks/warez.

Google launches with PageRank, revolutionizing relevance.

SEO emerges: tweaking HTML, metadata, content structure for rankings.

Google AdWords launches, introducing keyword-based advertising

Black-hat practices like keyword stuffing and link farms rise (later penalized).

Monetization drives frontend changes: popup wars, intrusive banners, auto-playing media, and SEO spam (content farms).

Google AdSense follows, letting site owners embed contextual ads, monetizing content at scale.

Bing launches, giving Microsoft a foothold in search.

Mobile-first indexing, Schema.org, and Core Web Vitals elevate performance/accessibility.

The ad ecosystem pushes responsive design (adaptive ad units) and regulations like GDPR/CCPA introduce cookie consent banners.

AI-powered search and voice assistants shift from links to direct answers.

Cookies are introduced by Netscape, enabling session state, shopping carts, and later ad tracking.

Third-party cookies fuel the rise of targeted ads, analytics, and retargeting, shaping how frontends load external scripts.

Do Not Track (DNT) is proposed as a browser feature, though adoption is limited.

Growing privacy concerns lead to stricter regulations and browser features:

• GDPR (2018) in the EU requires explicit user consent for data collection.
• CCPA (2020) brings similar rules to California.
• Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (2017) and Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection (2019) block third-party cookies by default.

Chrome announces the phase-out of third-party cookies (ongoing), pushing new standards like Privacy Sandbox.

Adult industry helped popularize Flash video (FLV); early Adaptive Streaming and DRM experimentation.

P2P platforms arise: Gnutella, Kazaa, BitTorrent.

Internet Explorer 6 launches, notorious for lack of standards support.

Gatas Parlaments releases the first free online release in Norway or in general: "Holdning over underholdning".

Gmail shows power of AJAX for dynamic apps.

Early JS libraries/frameworks emerge: Prototype.js, script.aculo.us, jQuery (2006), Blueprint CSS.

YouTube launches, bringing video mainstream.

Google Chrome launches with the fast V8 JavaScript engine.

Marillion, first band in the world to legally release their album on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

Web Workers introduced for background threads.

Node.js created by Ryan Dahl, bringing JavaScript to the server and powering modern tooling.

Silverlight (Microsoft) and Adobe Flex attempt rich, enterprise web apps beyond Flash.

Enterprise platforms (e.g., Salesforce Visualforce) push component-driven UI in business apps.

"Web 2.0" describes the shift to interactive, user-driven platforms (AJAX, UGC, blogs, wikis, tagging/sharing).

Blogger launches; LiveJournal gains traction.

WordPress is released, becoming the most popular open-source blogging/CMS platform.

Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Gmail become Web 2.0 archetypes.

"Web 3.0" discussions: linked data, decentralization, blockchain, P2P.

Apple releases the iPhone with a full browser (Safari) and multitouch.

Google Android launches, accelerating adoption.

Mobile browsers rapidly evolve with modern rendering and full CSS/JS support.

App Store and Google Play shift expectations to app-like experiences.

Ethan Marcotte coins Responsive Web Design (RWD).

Bootstrap popularizes mobile-first design with ready-made components.

Opera Mini brings compressed web browsing to feature phones.

iPhone redefines mobile web with a full browser and multitouch UX.

Android accelerates global smartphone adoption.

AngularJS popularizes declarative, data-driven UIs.

Backbone.js introduces MVC patterns in the browser.

Knockout.js introduces MVVM-style two-way data binding and observables in the browser, influencing later framework ergonomics.

Bootstrap brings responsive design with ready-made CSS components.

WebRTC standardizes real-time audio, video, and data channels.

WebGL enables hardware-accelerated 2D/3D graphics without plugins.

Web Components offer a framework-agnostic component model, underpinning many design systems and cross-framework integrations.

React introduces component-based UI with a virtual DOM.

Service Workers enable offline caching, background sync, push (PWA foundations).

TypeScript grows as a typed superset enabling safer large-scale apps.

Vue.js and Svelte appear as lighter alternatives.

GitHub becomes central for collaboration, open source, and developer culture.

Grunt popularizes JavaScript task automation (minify, concat, watch).

Gulp introduces a faster, streaming-based build pipeline.

Bower becomes the first mainstream frontend package manager (pre-npm dominance).

ESLint launches, setting the standard for JavaScript linting and code quality.

Plain text editors like Notepad, vi, Emacs, BBEdit used for early coding.

WYSIWYG tools like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver enabled drag-and-drop site creation.

TextMate and Sublime Text gain popularity for speed and plugins.

Firebug launches, introducing live DOM/CSS/JS debugging in the browser.

Chrome DevTools becomes a game-changer with profiling, network inspection, responsive testing.

JSFiddle launches as an online playground for HTML/CSS/JS.

WebStorm offers a professional IDE experience tailored to JavaScript/frontend.

CodePen adds a social layer for sharing and exploring UI concepts.

Atom (GitHub) markets itself as a "hackable" editor; influences modern extensibility.

VS Code releases; becomes the most widely used editor for frontend devs.

StackBlitz introduces a full in-browser dev environment powered by WebAssembly.

Source Code Control System (SCCS). Closed source, free with UNIX

Revision Control System (RCS), open source.

CVS emerges as an early widely adopted version control system.

Subversion (SVN) released as a replacement for CVS.

Git created by Linus Torvalds, introducing distributed version control.

Mercurial (Hg) released as a simpler alternative, used by Mozilla/Python before migrations to Git.

GitHub launches with social features (PRs, issues, stars).

npm released, creating a central registry for JavaScript packages.

QUnit (jQuery team) introduces unit testing for browser JS.

Jasmine and Mocha popularize BDD/TDD patterns.

Jest becomes the de-facto test runner for React and beyond.

Cypress streamlines end-to-end testing; Selenium remains a cross-browser staple.

ECMAScript 3 formalizes core JavaScript features.

ES5 adds JSON, strict mode, getters/setters.

ES6 (ES2015) introduces classes, modules, arrow functions, promises, let/const.

Annual updates add async/await, import/export, optional chaining, Intl, etc.

W3C/WHATWG split leads to HTML5 as a living standard.

Table-based layouts and spacer GIFs used before CSS matured.

CSS3 adds animations, rounded corners, gradients, shadows.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) coined by Ethan Marcotte.

Flat design (Metro, iOS7) shifts aesthetics toward minimalism and clarity.

Design Systems emerge: Material, Lightning, Carbon with reusable tokens and components.

Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD integrate design and development workflows.

CSS Modules popularize locally-scoped class names and build-time composition, reducing global CSS collisions.

styled-components brings CSS-in-JS with tagged template literals and runtime styling co-located with React components.

Emotion offers high-performance CSS-in-JS with strong DX and theming; widely adopted across React apps.

Linaria pioneers zero-runtime CSS-in-JS via compile-time extraction, cutting client-side style cost.

Next.js mainstreams SSR/SSG in React, pushing pre-rendered HTML and critical CSS—an echo of server-first "PHP-days".

Stitches focuses on design tokens, atomic CSS output, and runtime performance with partial static extraction.

vanilla-extract delivers type-safe, compile-time CSS with CSS Variables; no client runtime.

Panda CSS (from the Chakra team) adopts static extraction + design tokens/recipes, marrying utility ergonomics with predictable, tree-shakeable CSS.

React Server Components (RSC) and modern SSR pipelines reduce client JS and runtime styling costs, accelerating shift to compiled styles.

Rise of DevOps and CI/CD (Jenkins, Travis CI, GitHub Actions).

Cloud platforms and Netlify/Vercel simplify frontend deployment.

Bundlers/compilers: Webpack, Babel, Parcel, Rollup.

WebAssembly (Wasm) released for near-native performance in the browser.

Jamstack, SSGs like Gatsby, Next.js, Nuxt.js flourish.

Section 508 amended, requiring accessibility for U.S. federal agencies.

WCAG 1.0 published as the first international web accessibility standard.

WAI-ARIA specs begin, improving accessibility semantics.

Accessibility becomes core in frameworks/design systems with ARIA and contrast tooling.

YSlow and PageSpeed Insights introduce performance best practices.

Google Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals provide measurable UX metrics.

REST APIs replace SOAP/XML-heavy approaches.

JSON becomes the lightweight data format of choice.

GraphQL released, offering flexible queries.

Frontends consume microservices and edge APIs for real-time, global apps.

Turbolinks (Rails) speeds navigation by swapping HTML over the wire without full page reloads.

Stimulus introduces lightweight controllers for progressive enhancement, complementing server-rendered HTML.

Phoenix LiveView streams server-rendered HTML over websockets for interactive apps without heavy client JS.

Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) formalizes the HTML-over-the-wire approach for Rails and beyond.

htmx enables hypermedia-driven UIs with HTML attributes—requesting, swapping, and animating HTML fragments with minimal JS.

Laravel Livewire brings server-driven component interactivity to PHP, echoing classic server-first patterns with modern DX.

WebSockets standardize persistent, bidirectional communication.

WebRTC enables real-time audio, video, and P2P data channels.

Realtime experiences go mainstream in web apps.

PhoneGap / Apache Cordova enable web apps inside native wrappers on iOS/Android.

Electron allows packaging web apps as cross-platform desktop applications.

React Native brings React's component model to mobile with native APIs.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) emerge with installability and offline support.

Capacitor, Expo, and Tauri continue to blur lines between web, mobile, and desktop.