Evolution of Web Tech and Browsers

Hey, there! Have you ever wondered how exactly does web work and what really happens when you enter a URL in that mysterious browser of yours? Don’t worry, you’re not alone — most of us treat the web as some kind of black box. But since you’ve clicked on this blog, I’m guessing you might want to peek inside. That’s fantastic! Curiosity might have killed the cat, but for developers, it’s the secret sauce.

Even if you know a bit about how it works, you might still question why it evolved this way. I believe that “to understand the present and predict or influence the future, we need to know the past”. Or as some suggested, hum chronology samajhna chahiye! So let’s walk through the evolution of web tech and browsers, breaking it down into four simplified phases for clarity. By the end of this journey, you’ll understand not only how web technologies evolved, but also what happens under the hood, why these changes happened and what they mean for the future of the web.

Note : These are not exact timelines but rather simplified phases to help with understanding.

Zeroth Phase: The Prehistoric Web

Let’s rewind to a time before the 1980s

Imagine a bunch of researchers scurrying around universities in the U.S., laying down physical wires between computers to transfer or share data. These tech pioneers established protocols like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to share files and send emails — mostly about their groundbreaking experiments and perhaps the occasional office gossip. There used to be servers to which we could connect through a remote client, and store or fetch files on the disk using written commands.

This was good for small amounts of data, but as the data grew faster and faster, finding specific information became a real headache. Retrieving data required knowing exact paths, server addresses, and perhaps doing a little dance to appease the computer gods. Valuable information risked being lost in the digital shuffle, scattered across servers like socks disappearing in a laundry whirlpool.

First Phase: The Birth of the Web

Enter the late 1980s and early 1990s

Along came a brilliant British fellow named Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He penned a proposal called Information Management: A Proposal. In which he talked about using non-linear text systems known as “hypertext”, which means text that includes the links to the relevant information connected like a giant spider web. So navigating and exploring through related data is easier, and information loss will be minimized!

In this proposal, he also referred to interconnected computers as the “web”. And just like that, the World Wide Web was born! He didn’t stop there; he went on to invent HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), develop the first browser, charmingly named WorldWideWeb (later rebranded as Nexus), the first HTTP web server, and the first website. Talk about overachieving!

• HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol): A set of rules, syntax, and semantics used for the transfer of information between a client (e.g., your web browser) and a web server (the remote computer hosting the website). If you are wondering about the name, initially it was only meant for the transfer of HTML files. But it evolved to support the transfer of all types of data in later versions, after the introduction of headers, notably the Content-Type header.
  
  

• HTTP Web Server : A computer which can understand this HTTP protocol. The main job of this is to parse the request and serve the requested response, at this point of time mostly static HTML, CSS, JPG files.

This is when HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) came into play, combining the idea of hypertext with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which was then used for formatting documents. The first version of HTML was pretty basic — it supported headings, paragraphs, lists, and links. No fancy fonts or flashy animations — just the essentials.

For the first couple of years, the web was like an exclusive club for researchers and academics. Then some clever folks developed a browser called Mosaic, which could display images. Yes, images! This made the web more accessible to the general public because, let’s face it, a picture is worth a thousand lines (no picture in this blog though ?)!

Under the Browser’s Hood

So, let’s see what was happening inside these browsers with just above capabilities

User Interface : Every browser had a navigation bar at the top where all your open tabs (or windows back then) were visible. Below that was the address bar where you’d enter the website’s address. Below that is the place (viewport) where the contents of the website you have entered will be displayed. Remember, this was before search engines, so if you didn’t know the exact address, you were out of luck — kind of like trying to find a place without GPS or a map.

Fetching Data : When you enter a website address, the browser’s Network Module would fetch the data by performing tasks like DNS resolution and establishing a secure connection with the server to start the communication. The browser would then receive data in the form of HTML from the server.

Rendering Engine : The rendering engine would start parsing the HTML. If it encountered tags that required additional resources, like images () or styles (