History of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web ("WWW" or "The Web") is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet also do. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

CERN 

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed a system for managing documentation at CERN utilizing the Internet and hypertext.
He designed a protocol (HTTP) and a markup language (HTML); and developed a browser (WorldWideWeb), a web server (CERN httpd), and a website (http://info.cern.ch/).

WorldWideWeb only ran on NeXTSTEP, however. Nicola Pellow wrote the Line Mode Browser which could work with a CLI.

While the Web was successful at CERN, it struggled to gain acceptance elsewhere. In two years, there were only 50 websites in the world.

In 1991, the University of Minnesota released a document browsing system for the Internet called Gopher. In less than a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers.
The consensus was that this would be the primary way that folks would interact with the Internet. However, in 1993, the University of Minnesota declared that Gopher was proprietary and would have to be licensed.
In response, CERN put their code into the public domain which spurred the development of various browsers.

NCSA 

In 1993, NCSA used CERN's code to develop Mosaic, a  browser that could display inline images
and submit forms
for Windows, Macintosh and X-Windows. NCSA also developed HTTPd, a Unix web server that used the Common Gateway Interface to process forms and Server Side Includes for dynamic content. Both client and server were free to use with no restrictions.

Mosaic was an immediate hit. Within a year, Web traffic surpassed Gopher's.
Wired declared that Mosaic made non-Internet services obsolete.

Netscape 

In 1994, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, the lead developer on Mosaic, founded Netscape and released Navigator, a browser that soon became the dominant web client.
They also released the Netsite Commerce web server which could handle SSL requests thus enabling e-commerce on the Web.
SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introduced cookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature.

In 1995, Netscape released Navigator 2 introducing Java applets and Javascript.

Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering the dot-com bubble. Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website.

In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft.
In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launched Mozilla.
AOL bought Netscape that year
and then disbanded it in 2003.

Apache 

After Rob McCool left the NCSA for Netscape, development on the NCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd.
They called their version of HTTPd, Apache.

Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web.
After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python. Together with Linux and MySQL, it became known as the LAMP platform.

The Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced many web software projects.

Microsoft 

In 1995, Bill Gates outlined Microsoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo.
Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and released Internet Explorer 1.0 in 1995 and
IE2 later that year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and Javascript. It was the start of a browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.

IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets, ActiveX, and CSS.
At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20% in 1997.

IE4, released in 1997, introduced Dynamic HTML setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution.
In 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market.
It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years.

Standards 

In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN and founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT's LCS in order to create standards for the Web.

Unfortunately, Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of a browser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g., blink and marquee).

In 1995, NS and MS came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.

In 1997, the W3C published the standard for HTML 4, which included Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags.

Unfortunately, the W3C couldn't enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant.

This frustrated web designers who formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards.
A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards.

Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape and Microsoft was slow to update IE.

Mozilla and Apple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox and Safari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser.

Google 

During the dot-com bubble, many companies vied to create a dominant Web portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that would attract advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they weren't interested in encouraging folks to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content.

In 1998, Google launched a stripped down search engine that delivered superior results.
It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, with AdWords, Google had an effective business model.
From $70 million in 2000,
Google brought in over $100 billion in ad revenue in 2020.
With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, portals either scaled back operations,
floundered,
or shut down entirely.

Web 2.0 

In 1999, Microsoft added a little noticed feature called XMLHttpRequest to MSIE.
In 2002, developers at Oddpost used this feature to create the first Ajax application.
It was a webmail client that performed as well as a desktop application.

Ajax apps were revolutionary. Webpages evolved beyond static documents to full-blown, interactive applications. Websites began offering APIs in addition to webpages. Developers created a plethora of Ajax apps including new types of social apps and mashups. Analysts called it Web 2.0.

Browser vendors improved the performance of their JavaScript engines and dropped support for Flash and Java.

Traditional client server applications were replaced by cloud apps. Amazon reinvented itself as a cloud service provider.

WHATWG 

In spite of the success of Web 2.0 applications, the W3C forged ahead with their plan to replace HTML with XHTML and represent all data in XML.

In 2004, representatives from Mozilla, Opera, and Apple formed an opposing group, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), dedicated to improving HTML while maintaining backward compatibility.

For the next several years, websites did not transition their content to XHTML; browser vendors did not adopt XHTML2; and developers eschewed XML in favor of JSON.

By 2007, the W3C conceded and announced they were restarting work on HTML
and in 2009, they officially abandoned XHTML.

In 2019, the W3C ceded control of the HTML specification, now called the HTML Living Standard, to WHATWG.

Mobile 

Early attempts to allow wireless devices to access the Web used simplified formats such as i-mode and WAP.

In 2007, Apple introduced the first smartphone with a full-featured browser. Other companies followed suit and in 2011, smartphone sales overtook PCs. Since 2016, most visitors access websites with mobile devices which led to the adoption of responsive web design.

Apple, Mozilla, and Google have taken different approaches to integrating smartphones with modern web apps.

Apple initially promoted web apps for the iPhone, but then encouraged developers to make native apps.

Mozilla announced Web APIs in 2011 to allow webapps to access hardware features such as audio, camera or GPS. Frameworks such as Cordova and Ionic allow developers to build web apps as native apps.
Mozilla released a mobile OS designed to run web apps in 2012, but discontinued it in 2015.

In 2015, Google announced specifications for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and progressive web applications (PWA). AMPs use a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and Web Components to optimize web pages for mobile devices; and PWAs are web pages that, with a combination of web workers and manifest files, can be saved to a mobile device and opened like a native app.

Chrome 

In 2008, Google released their Chrome browser with the first JIT JavaScript engine, V8,
which overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years
and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two.

At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome's codebase, Chromium.

In 2009, Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed Javascript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such as MEAN. Thanks to frameworks such as Electron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such as Slack.

In 2011, Acer and Samsung began selling Chromebooks, cheap laptops running Chrome OS capable of running web apps. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.

In 2021, Microsoft rewrote their Edge browser to use Chromium as its code base in order to be more compatible with Chrome.

See also

 History of hypertext
 History of the Internet
 History of the web browser
 Usage share of web browsers
 History of web syndication technology
 List of websites founded before 1995

Notes

Further reading
 Brügger, Niels, ed, Web25:  Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web (Peter Lang, 2017).

External links 
 Web History: first 30 years
 "A Little History of the World Wide Web: from 1945 to 1995", Dan Connolly, W3C, 2000
 "The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future", Tim Berners-Lee, August 1996
 The History of the Web
 Web Development History
 A Brief(ish) History of the Web Universe, Brian Kardell
 Web History Community Group, W3C
 The history of the Web, W3C

World Wide Web
World Wide Web
History of computing