The Web Is Older Than Most Developers Think
The first website ever published went live on August 6, 1991. It was a plain text page written by Tim Berners-Lee, running on a NeXT workstation at CERN. No images. No CSS. No JavaScript. Just structured text with clickable links. The URL was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and it is still accessible today.
That fact alone is worth sitting with for a second. The web is 35 years old and your browser can still render that original page without any compatibility shims.
JavaScript Was Written in 10 Days
Brendan Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript in May 1995 while working at Netscape. He was given 10 days. The language was originally called Mocha, then LiveScript, and only became JavaScript as a marketing move to piggyback on Java's growing popularity at the time. The two languages have almost nothing in common.
This explains a lot about JavaScript's quirks. typeof null === 'object' is a bug from those 10 days that can never be fixed because it would break too much of the internet.
HTTP/1.1 Dominated the Web for 16 Years
HTTP/1.1 was standardized in 1997. It remained the dominant protocol until HTTP/2 arrived in 2015. For nearly two decades, developers built entire optimization disciplines around a protocol that only allowed one request per TCP connection at a time. That is why techniques like CSS sprite sheets, domain sharding, and file concatenation existed. HTTP/2 made many of those techniques obsolete overnight.
HTTP/3 now uses QUIC over UDP instead of TCP, which reduces the head-of-line blocking problem that plagued even HTTP/2.
The Average Web Page Is Now Heavier Than Doom
The original Doom game shipped on two 3.5-inch floppy disks. Total size: around 2.39 MB. The median desktop web page weight as of 2024 is around 2.5 MB according to HTTP Archive data. Your average marketing website is literally heavier than a 1993 first-person shooter.
Mobile page weight median sits at about 2.2 MB. The bloat mostly comes from JavaScript (around 500 KB median), images, and third-party tracking scripts.
CSS Grid Took 20 Years to Arrive
Web developers have wanted a proper grid layout system since the early 2000s. What they got instead was floats, then inline-block hacks, then various polyfills. Flexbox arrived in 2009 and solved one dimension of the problem. CSS Grid, which was proposed by Microsoft in 2011 and shipped in all major browsers by March 2017, finally delivered what designers had been drawing in their mockups for two decades.
The spec was literally developed at Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer 10. IE shipped it behind a flag in 2012, years before anyone else.
WebAssembly Is Not a New Idea
WebAssembly launched in 2017 but the idea of running compiled code in the browser is ancient. Java applets tried it in 1995. Flash did it from 1996 onward. ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer attempted the same thing. asm.js in 2013 was a direct precursor, compiling C and C++ to a subset of JavaScript that ran near native speed.
WebAssembly is different because it is a proper binary format with a specification maintained by a W3C working group, not a proprietary plugin. Figma's entire rendering engine runs on WebAssembly.
The Browser You Use Shares Its Engine With More Than You Think
Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Samsung Internet, and hundreds of other browsers all run on the same engine: Blink, a fork of WebKit that Google created in 2013. Safari uses WebKit. Firefox uses Gecko. That means roughly 70% of the browser market renders the web through one codebase, which has significant implications for how standards get adopted (or ignored).
Sources
- First website history: CERN, The birth of the Web - info.cern.ch
- JavaScript creation timeline: Brendan Eich, Popularity, 2008 - brendaneich.com
- HTTP/1.1 standardization: IETF RFC 2616 (1999) and RFC 7230 (2014) - tools.ietf.org
- Web page weight data: HTTP Archive, State of the Web 2024 - httparchive.org
- CSS Grid history: W3C CSS Working Group - w3.org/TR/css-grid-1
- WebAssembly specification: W3C WebAssembly Working Group - webassembly.org
- Browser market share (engine distribution): StatCounter Global Stats - gs.statcounter.com
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