1995
April
10th
Opera Software first introduced to the public a new MultiTorg Opera 1.0 web browser that used MDI (Multiple Document Interface) technology. The use of MDI enabled users to simultaneously open several windows of webpages within the browser. As of version 2.0, the browser’s name was shortened to Opera.
1995
April
13th
Lycos’s oldest search engines. The name of the search engine is derived from Lycosidae, a Latin name for a family of wolf spiders.
1995
May
User Experience was probably first heard in public at the CHI ’95 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems held on May 7-11, 1995 in Denver, Colorado. The combination of the two words User Experience first appeared in a presentation by Donald Norman, Jim Miller and Austin Henderson of Apple Computer entitled What You See, Some of What’s in the Future, And How We Go About Doing It: HI at Apple Computer, particularly in the sentence: “In this organizational overview, we cover some of the critical aspects of human interface research and application at Apple or, as we prefer to call it, the ‘User Experience.’”
1995
May
25th
Jeffrey Zeldman, Steve McCarron and Alec Pollak – created an official website for Batman Forever. At the time, it was one of the first web projects that used the WWW service as a marketing and visual medium.
1995
June
8th
Rasmus Lerdorf designed the first version of the popular PHP 1.0 scripting language. The term PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. In 1997, Israeli developers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser to create the basis for PHP 3. They also changed the name of the language to a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
1995
July
16th
Jeff Bezos, launched one of the first online stores on Amazon.com on July 5, 1994. Amazon first began as an online bookstore and later expanded its range of products to CDs, DVDs, software, clothes, toys, etc. In 1998, Amazon purchased the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and, a year later, the Alexa.com web service. In 2002, Amazon started running a cloud platform called Amazon Web Services (AWS), and as of November 2007, the Amazon Kindle e-reader belongs to one of its major products.
1995
August
16th
Internet Explorer 1.0. In the original version of Windows 95, a web browser was not available, as Microsoft underestimated the potential of the rapidly developing Internet.
Internet Explorer 1.0 occupied only 1 MB of disk space and its features were considerably limited compared to other browsers at the time.
1995
September
3rd
Pierre Omidyar, programmed a simple auction website called AuctionWeb. The first item Pierre Omidyar allegedly sold on the portal was his own broken laser pointer for $ 14.83. In September 1997, the portal was officially renamed to eBay. In October 2002, eBay switched to the PayPal online payment system and in 2005, eBay bought Skype VoIP.
1995
September
18th
Netscape Navigator 2.0 as its new major product. The browser contained a wide range of innovations and enhancements. Among other features, Netscape Navigator 2.0 supported JavaScript, animated GIFs, the HTML tag <frame> and proprietary tag <blink>. Netscape Mail 2.0 was also part of version 2.0, making Netscape Navigator 2.0 a fully operational Web application package.
1995
November
FrontPage 1.0 editor for WYSIWYG web development. In January 1996, Microsoft bought Vermeer and, in June, released an editor called Microsoft FrontPage 1.1. Microsoft expected that extending its software portfolio to a web editor would provide a considerable advantage in the impending browser wars.
1995
November
24th
HTML 2.0. HTML 2.0 supported forms, tables, graphics, and a number of new tags, such as <!DOCTYPE>, <head>, <body>, <form>, <img>, <input>, <select>, <strong> and others.
1995
December
Adobe PageMill 1.0. The editor allowed users to easily create websites without any knowledge of the basics of HTML.
1995
December
Lynda Weinman, a computer instructor and graphic designer, launched one of the first online libraries of training courses for web developers at lynda.com.
1995
December
4th
Brendan Eich of Netscape designed the first version of an object-oriented JavaScript that became widely used to create interactive websites. JavaScript later become the basis for other programming languages, such as ActionScript used in Macromedia Flash. In 1998, JavaScript was standardized by ISO.
1995
December
15th
AltaVista search engine. Thanks to high-performance hardware, AltaVista was able to perform a quick full-text search across a wide range of websites. In 1997, the first free online translator Babel Fish became part of AltaVista. In 2003, AltaVista was taken over by Yahoo! and due to Google’s dominant position among search engines, the AltaVista project was terminated on July 8, 2013.
1996
April
1st
Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat founded a company called Alexa Internet. The company’s original vision was to develop advanced web navigation that would continually improve itself on the basis of user-generated data. For this purpose, the Alexa toolbar 1.0 was created in 1997 as an extension of the browser. In 1999, Alexa Internet was bought by Amazon.
1996
May
12th
Brewster Kahle founded a non-profit organization called the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive digital library is currently the largest archive of digital documents in the world. Since 1996, more than 866 billion websites have been stored in the archive (*as of May 2024).
1996
September
JScript 1.0. By changing the name to JScript, Microsoft wanted to avoid potential patent litigation with Sun Microsystems, which created the Java programming language.
1996
December
Active Server Pages (ASP 1.0), a server-side script engine for dynamically generated websites. A distinctly modified and improved ASP technology, ASP.NET 1.0, was released in January 2002.
1996
December
17th
Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1). Cascading styles describe how to display elements in documents written in HTML, XHTML, and XML markup languages.
Håkon Wium Lie, who was working at CERN under Tim Berners-Lee at the time.
1996
December
18th
FutureSplash animator. The program was used to create vector animations that could be played with the FutureSplash Viewer plugin in the then popular Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. In December 18th 1996, Macromedia released an enhanced version of this program called Macromedia Flash 1.0.
1997
January
14th
HTML 3.2 markup language. The original HTML 3.0 version had never become a standard, as it was too complicated, and the leading Microsoft and Netscape developers had a problem implementing it. In the HTML 3.2 specification, among others, new tags appeared, such as <center>, <div>, <font>, <script>, <style>.
1997
April
7th
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) officially launched its activity. The main goal of the WAI project is to improve the accessibility of websites and WWW services for users with disabilities.
1997
May
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term indicating a set of techniques and rules that are applied to provide a better position of websites in search results for selected keywords. The first use of the term is not fully documented. According to Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Watch, the term Search Engine Optimization first appeared in May 1997.
1997
June
11th
the first browser war, Netscape released Netscape Communicator 4.0, a web application suite. It included, for example, Netscape Navigator 4.0 web browser with CSS1 support, Netscape Messenger email client, Netscape Composer HTML editor and Netscape Calendar. In January 1998, Netscape announced that the subsequent versions of the software will be developed as open source projects under Mozilla and will be available to users free of charge.
1997
September
30th
Internet Explorer 4.0. IE 4.0 was integrated into the Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems and was freely available for the Mac OS, Solaris and HP-UX platforms. The distribution methods and integration of Internet Explorer into Windows subsequently became one of the subjects of legal proceedings between the US government and Microsoft over the abuse of a dominant market position. Internet Explorer 4.0 gained more than 60% market share at the beginning of 1999, contributing significantly to Microsoft winning over Netscape in the so-called first browser war.
1997
October
Dynamic HTML (DHTML) was first introduced in connection with the release of Internet Explorer 4.0. It did not refer to a new stand-alone language, but only a combination of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript technology to enhance interactivity and website dynamics.
1997
December
Dreamweaver 1.0 website editor. The editor allowed users to switch between text and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode. The first version of the Dreamweaver editor was only available for Mac OS, and in March 1998, a version for Windows was released.
1997
December
18th
W3C HTML Validator. The tool for the validation of documents (HTML, XHTML, MathML, etc.) was based on an older project entitled The Kinder, Gentler HTML Validator, created by Gerald Oskoboina.
1997
December
18th
HTML 4.0 specification. The HTML 4.0 specification was divided into three variants: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset, and its aim was to separate the HTML semantics and the document layout (formatted using only CSS) into two separate parts. In December 1999, recommendations were published for a revised version, HTML 4.01.
