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10 Years of the World Wide Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the waiting-for-godot dept.

NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today (oh, I guess you could mark time from the 1.0 release, but who's counting), marking the first milestone in the evolution of the graphical World Wide Web. HTTP was originally developed between 1989-1991, but didn't take off until there was a useful browser which could display inline images. You can still download old versions of Mosaic from browsers.evolt.org. So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?

15 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. 10 years... So similiar... by E1ven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow.. After downloading and looking at "NCSA MOSIAC FOR MS WINDOWS" it's amazing how LITTLE the browser has changed..

    All major innovations, such as URL bar, Forward/Back buttons, reload and home buttons, as well as bookmarks are allready in place. It even has a Search bar!

    90% of the "features" of a browser haven't changed in the last 10 years.. It really makes you wonder how often people re-think an interface, or if they just use and evolve what they are used to.

    I'm honestly curious, what major innovations have we seen?
    Snapback [Apple Safari]
    Tabbed browsing, and related enhancements (such as Open a group of tabs) [Mozilla, etc]

    Umm.....?

    One other feature I found interesting is that in NCSA Mosaic, there was a "annotate" function.. Presumably this let people add to a page, if the server were set properly, almost like a WIKI situation?
    Did anyone ever work with this?

    --
    Colin Davis
    1. Re:10 years... So similiar... by L0stb0Y · · Score: 5, Insightful

      With as little the browser has changed, its amazing how much code-bloat there is in the new browsers of today (ok, not counting Opera, etc...)

      Lots of the "improvements" (I use the term loosely) are in the form of supported formats/scripts, plugins, handling of international character sets, etc...

      AND a ton of CRAP. BUT- just for fun, have you tried surfing using Lynx lately? It just doesn't fly anymore. Just like if you tried the original Mosaic, you'd lose quite a bit (or at least lots of pages would work).

      But yeah, as far as design, and apparent usability to the user, the browser hasn't changed much.

      LosT

      --
      "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
    2. Re:10 years... So similiar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm honestly curious, what major innovations have we seen?

      Don't forget Forms. Forms are what really changed the web into an application base rather than a hypertext document reader.

    3. Re:10 years... So similiar... by bashibazouk · · Score: 5, Funny
      In other words, in 10 years we've gone from functional to annoying.

      That's progress for you.

    4. Re:10 years... So similiar... by bheerssen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Just for fun, here's a screenshot of your comment viewed in lynx.

      --
      (Score: -1, Stupid)
    5. Re:10 years... So similiar... by JCholewa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > It was invented by xerox but quickly perfected by Microsoft and has
      > stayed pretty much unchanged in over 20 years. People keep talking
      > about new 3D OS's and stuff but the fact is that that most of the design
      > in current OS's is excellent and needs no improvement, browsers included.

      Bah, I declare shenanigans on that. There's tons of room for improvement in the windows ui for both power users and normal people.

      The Start Menu needs a complete overhaul. It's not intuitive once you open up the "Programs" list. Currently, if you want to find a mail program, you'd have to search through each container, since each container typically refers to a company. Want to write a composition (high school term meaning "text file")? What is your choice of programs for that? Where are they located? Well, on my machine, two of them are in "Accessories" (NotePad and WordPad), one is in "EditPad Lite", one is under "OpenOffice.org 1.0" and one is at the bottom of the list, not in any particular container. That's really inconsistant, and it would confuse users who weren't already totally used to it.

      The intuitive way would be to categorize programs. That's how they do it in linux. It's how I categorize my programs in Windows 2000 (though I have to manually hack stuff around, and that breaks the uninstallers a little). Yeah, it's not always easy to put everything into unique categories, but it's a heck of a lot easier than having a flat list of mixed between company names and program names. All the programs for the above task are under either "Applications -> Text Editors" (for simple text editors) or "Office -> Wordprocessors" (for more complex editors). I don't have to hunt through my entire list of programs to find something that does what I want, and I don't have to rely on some default link button on my application bar in the hopes that it'll take me to the best program.

      I also like having every executable in the path. This may be a bit power-userish, but it's sometimes a lot faster and easier to hit "ALT-F2" (to bring up the "Run" dialog) and type in "opera" than wasting time reaching for the mouse and hunting out where the link to the program is. I wish that I could type Win-R and "opera" on this Win2k machine, but it would simply take forever to put every single applicable directory into the file path.

      Meh, there's a lot of things that could change to substantially improve the usability of the interface for normal users. People still don't understand the difference between a button (one click to run this program) and an icon (two clicks to run this program, unless you have it configured for one click, but then get ready to confuse people who actually got used to double clicking, because they double click everything, even web links!). Many people still don't understand that you can open more than one program without needing to close the current program. These things are not obvious to most people because the system does not make it easy enough to understand. Heck, it was probably a huge mistake to put both the current task list and the shortcut icons on the same bar. If the taskbar were just a vanilla taskbar, then maybe the masses would have taken to the concept of "if I see a name on this bar, that means that the program/application with this name is doing something even though I can't see it". But now, if a button is on the bar, it might be a task that's running, it might be a launchable program that's not running, it might be in that bizarre in-between realm of the system tray, or it might make that list pop up with the "Settings" and the "Programs" and the list of fifteen AOL and MSN related buttons above the "Programs" thing.

      Heck, I'm not even touching the power user stuff, like mouse gestures and virtual desktops and soforth. The reason why people don't move to newer interfaces isn't because the interface is excellent. It's because these people spent a decade struggling

  2. Web browsing in 2013 by freeze128 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It will take forever for the 3d holograms to load over a broadband cable connection. Also, the psychic popup ads will be a real pain....

  3. 2013? by Slashed+Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?

    Television :(

  4. Re:MOSAIC! by pi+radians · · Score: 5, Funny

    My first was using Lynx through telnet to a local community college... ... the porn sucked.

    --

    sin(6cos(r)+5A)
  5. Re:Still using it...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's a story behind that. As far as I recall without the help of Google...

    1) Mosaic was originally free software.
    2) A company (Mosaic Spyglass?) was formed to make it into a commercial product.
    3) Microsoft, desperate for a browser, licensed Mosaic from that company, on terms that required a certain percentage of the amount made by Microsoft from each browser sale.
    4) Microsoft then turned around and gave away the browser, Mosaic's lawyers all slapped their foreheads in collective shock, and Mosaic Spyglass never saw a red cent from the Borg.

  6. 12 Years of the World Wide Web by gbitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.

  7. In 10 years ... by Paul+Lamere · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hope that someone realizes that using "www" with 9 syllables is a silly way to abbreviate "world wide web" with 3.

  8. I'll tell you what innovation we will see. by joe_fish · · Score: 5, Insightful
    None. That's how much.

    Microsoft has left IE virtually unchanged for quite a while, because they don't need put any effort into it anymore. They have a 70-80% market share that isn't going anywhere quickly so why bother?

    IE does not has not moved an inch standards wise since IE 4, so "new" things like XHTML are not supported and only work because IE will support virtually any markup. Just try using a correct XHTML MIME type, or using XHTML DOM (which is read-only in XHTML) or CSS (changes to case rules in XHTML) in IE and it will fail. Mozilla and Opera (and no doubt Konq also) do all the above just fine.

    Maybe they will do tabbed browsing to stop people saying it is behind for features, maybe they will gruddingly to pop-up blockers, or maybe they will just keep the ad revenue from MSN.

    Until MS update IE the web stays looking just as it does now for 70-80% of users, however innovative the rest of the world gets.

    --
    DWR is Ajax for Java
  9. Re:nongraphical too by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Funny
    When I started using the Web, I had to telnet to a server at CERN (from Japan, no less) just to run Lynx.

    You had it lucky. Where I was stationed, we didn't have any newfangled interactive terminals. We had to punch our URLs onto cards and mail them to headquarters, then wait weeks for the next supply drop to bring our web page printouts and beef jerkey.

  10. Remembering the very first time you saw Mosaic... by eyefish · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I still remember the very first time I saw Mosaic: I was at a computer lab and a friend just told me about this "cool" thing that just came out. Needless to say, me being a geek and all, it took me only 5 minutes later to create my first web page (back then, HTML was *ultra* simple). I also vividly remember saying to my friend "this is the future of the Internet".

    I actually remember that at one point it was possible to view *ALL* the websites on the planet (tell that to the younger generation today!), and how every single day was very exciting to discover new things (the birth of yahoo, altavista, ebay, and amazon come to mind).

    That day I saw mosaic is on my list of days I could never forget, like the challenger explossion, the berlin wall coming down, the wall trade center attacks, and recently the columbia tragedy...