Links to the past: a history of the world wide web – timeline

As Tim Berners-Lee calls for an online bill of rights, Sean Clarke summarises the web's major developments since 1989
1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposes the web Berners-Lee writes a paper entitled Information management: a proposal that envisages a system of interlinked documents that would be stored in a variety of locations, and contain non-hierarchical links to one another. These documents could be looked at using a 'browser' application, which would open the internet to potential mass use. 1991 The web is born The first web pages begin to appear. At first they are of limited general appeal, but the system has become a reality.

1993-94 Browsers develop Continue.

The web's transition to the mainstream is helped by the appearance of Mosaic, an intuitive, user-friendly browser, in 1993, and then a year later by Netscape Navigator, which attains an 80% share of web browser usage by 1996. 1996 Internet Explorer 3.0 Internet Explorer 3.0 is provided free of charge with Windows 95, a practice known as 'bundling' that later brings Microsoft to the attention of anti-monopoly bodies in the US and EU. With its massive market dominance and tendency to favour Microsoft's own applications such as Media Player, there comes a de facto influence on emerging web technologies; if it doesn't work on IE, it doesn't work for most users. The web is at risk of becoming a proprietary technology. 1997 Google Before Google, sites such as Yahoo! created searchable directories of websites, but Google's focus on technology and indexing gives the impression that it is a gateway to the whole web. 1998 Blog comments Blogging emerged in the mid-1990s but the launch of Open Diary in 1998 is a watershed because it is the first significant platform to encourage reader responses or comments on individual blogposts Monica Lewinsky

When the Drudge Report, a gossipy news blog, breaks the story on 17 January of then US president Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, its headline is "Newsweek kills story on White House intern", reflecting the impotence of offline media to control the news agenda in an online world. 2001 Wikipedia Wikipedia is founded as a "multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia", to which anyone can contribute, and which anyone can access. By 2014 the English-language version has about 4.5million entries. 2003 The great firewall The Chinese government begins to pursue several initiatives to counter the potentially subversive influence of the open web, including this system of web filters that allows the authorities to block individual web pages, whole websites, or any page referencing a particular term. 2004 Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst /Reuters The site, which only becomes generally accessible in 2006, helps millions of people become more active online but is not on the open web as many of its pages, for good reasons, are only accessible to signed-in users. 2006 Google's Chinese censorship The search engine compromises with the government in Beijing on the issue of censoring search results, in order to get access to the billion-strong Chinese market. 2007 iPhone The iPhone, like Facebook, is another innovation that makes many people more active online, but at the same time draws them away from the open web, in this case into Apple's app ecosystem. Apps are small applications that may use the internet, or even web protocols, but are not usually web browsers. 2008 Google Chrome browser and Chrome OS Google releases a suite of products including a freeware browser called Chrome, and an operating system that consists of the Chrome browser plus a set of web-based applications to replace traditional, locally installed software.