Serendipity35

A post on https://thehistoryoftheweb.com posits that 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web. That's a debatable claim, but they have a point. It was a fascinating and turbulent year in general, as well as for the fairly new Web.

Look at some numbers. At the close of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. T the end of 1995, there were almost 75,000 and 700 new servers were being added to the web every day.

The web got a mention in The New York Times because it was new news. But the OJ trial was a bigger story. The White House got a website, but Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was also happening there. The Oklahoma City bombing was the major story of domestic terrorism. Windows 1995 was launched. The Palm Pilot was released.

The US Department of Justice was building a case for the 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft for what they called "monopolistic corporate maneuvering" because the company's Internet Explorer (trying to overtake Netscape Navigator) was free and bundled into Windows and didn't leave much incentive for competition.

If you're too young to remember Netscape know that by early 1996 that company had made a deal with America’s largest single online services provider, AOL Netscape pulled a Microsoft move and bundled a version of their browser directly into AOL’s platform and also did that with another big player at the time, CompuServe. In six months, Netscape had 10 million new users.

It was the start of the first of two "browser wars," but Internet Explorer ruled for almost a decade. Opera was released in April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers to exist, but it never grabbed a large portion of potential users. Firefox 1.0 wouldn't appear until 2004, and Chrome came in 2008. Apple's Safari was released in 2003 but was limited to Apple devices, so it wasn't as big a threat.