The World Wide Web Turns 25: We’ve Got 25 Fast Facts You Need to Know

11. The Web Makes Us More Susceptible to Privacy Violations

All this access to information and entertainment has come at a price. Between fears of NSA snooping and the news that Yahoo! users had their webcam footage spied upon, the web has left many average people surprisingly vulnerable to privacy violations.


12. Online Shopping Has Never Been Bigger

While it’s not as old as the Internet itself, Amazon.com is coming up on a milestone of its own. Amazon will turn 20 next year, and it could be argued that Amazon’s success set the stage for the broad range of web commerce sites out there today.

The Wall Street Journal writes that while online retail figures are very high, they still seem tiny when compared to brick and mortar stores.

“Even on the friendliest turf for online shopping — computers and electronics — Internet stores are claiming just 25% of the market,” the Journal notes.


13. The First Popular Web Browser Is No More

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(Wikipedia)

NBC notes that the first popular web browser came out in 1993. It was called Mosaic, and you can see it above. Wikipedia notes that the browser’s heyday came to an end around 1998, when other browsers became more popular.

In case you were wondering what the most popular browsers are today, ZDNet published an article last year than can shed some light on the subject. On tablets, Safari leads by “a wide margin.” On computers, however, Internet Explorer takes over 50% of users, with Firefox taking about 20% and Chrome taking about 17%. Safari, by contrast, gets just over 5%.


14. People Make Snap Judgements Based on Websites

According to report from Latitude, 61% of people admit that they have a better opinion of a brand when that brand offers a good mobile experience. In other words, if you have a bad mobile version of your website, consumers are unlikely have to have a favorable opinion of your entire brand.

These kinds of snap judgements aren’t limited to company websites. The same phenomenon can also be experienced on dating websites, or on apps like Tinder.


15. This Is the First Image Ever Uploaded to the Web

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(Wikipedia)

The image above is the very first image ever uploaded on the web. Les Horribles Cernettes was a doo-wop girl group. The group performed at the CERN Hardronic Festival in 1992, after which this image was posted on the web by Tim Berners-Lee.


On the next page, learn about AOL’s crazy CD scheme…