25 Years of World Wide Web

Introduction

The World Wide Web (WWW) completed 25 years of its existence on March 12, 2014. It is an information system that contains hypertext documents which are accessed via Internet. A document in the World Wide Web is known as webpage and it is controlled using browsers. British Computer Scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of WWW. He is considered to be the inventor of Web.

The Proposal of WWW

Sir Berners-Lee submitted a technical paper named “Information Management” on March 12, 1989 at a Physics laboratory in Switzerland. In 1991, the World Wide Web was created. As proposed, it contains various interlinked documents which are stored in a variety of locations, and contains non-hierarchical links to one another. These documents are controlled via web browsers.

The Formation of Web

In 1991, the web was formed. Initially it contained the documents of limited generals appeal – mostly described the web itself. Later the other documents were added to it.

Mosaic

NCSA Mosaic or Mosaic is the first Web Browser (1993), credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client of earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP and gopher. It was an intuitive and user-friendly browser, which was rapidly adopted by World Wide Web. Mosaic was the first graphical web browser.

Netscape Navigator Browser

Netscape Navigator was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1994. It was made freely available for non-commercial, educational or not-for-profit use. By 1996, it held 80% share of web browser usage. It was a cross-platform and Java enabled browser.

Yahoo! GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan. It was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet. In 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. It is currently active in Japan; defunct in the United States, Canada end Europe.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as a part of Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. It was initially released on 16^th August, 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! For Windows 95 that year. Later versions were available as free downloads, or in service packs, and included in the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) service releases if Windows 95 and later versions of Windows.

Google

Before Google, Yahoo! Had credited searchable directories of the web. But Google’s focus on technology and indexing gave the impression that it’s the gateway to the whole Web. It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on 4^th September, 1998 at Menlo Park, California. It is served worldwide. Some popular online products of Google are : Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google+ etc.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched on 15^th January, 2001. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It is the most popular free-access and free content Internet Encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It is the 7^th most popular website and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular reference work.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox (or simply Firefox) is a free and open-source web browser developed for Windows, OSX and Linux, with a mobile version for Android, by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It was released on September 23, 2002. It is available in 79 languages.

Facebook

Facebook is an online social networking service headquarted in Menlo Park, California. Its website was lanchecd by Mark  Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Edwardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustion Moskovitz and Chris Hughes on February 4, 2004. It was initially served in United States (2004-05), but now is served worldwide.

The subsidiaries of it are Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR and PrivateCore. It has 890 million daily active users on average for December 2014. 

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google Inc. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008 and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008. It is available in 53 languages.

References:   1. Wikipedia

                          2. Manoroma Yearbook 2015