It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers, bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page.

The use of social media, becoming common-place in the 2010s, allowed users to compose multimedia content without programming skills, making the Web ubiquitous in every-day life.

Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols were installed on Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe.

In 1988, the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was established and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.

Many online services existed before the creation of the World Wide Web, such as for example CompuServe, Usenet[11] and bulletin board systems.

[1][2] Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his manager, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation.

[16][17] The proposal was modelled after the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University.

It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn, presented the chronic problem of link rot.

This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992,[28] and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise, an application developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation.

In the early 1990s, Internet-based projects such as Archie, Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data.

[30] It offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the consensus was that Gopher would be the primary way that people would interact with the Internet.

[30] In response, on 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and released their code into the public domain.

The browser gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors' rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.

[30] Wired declared that Mosaic made non-Internet online services obsolete,[48] and the Web became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.

In keeping with its origins at CERN, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as SLAC and Fermilab.

A DCT variation, the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, led to the development of MP3, which was introduced in 1991 and became the first popular audio format on the Web.

The rate of web site deployment increased sharply around the world, and fostered development of international standards for protocols and content formatting.

[55] It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet.

[62] Increasing familiarity with the Web led to the growth of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide.

In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd.

[76] After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python.

[84] Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine in 2009 to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers.

[93] As new technologies made it easier to create websites that behaved dynamically, the Web attained greater ease of use and gained a sense of interactivity which ushered in a period of rapid popularization.

[94] The popularity of these sites, combined with developments in the technology that enabled them, and the increasing availability and affordability of high-speed connections made video content far more common on all kinds of websites.

Developers that wanted to offer sophisticated applications over the Web used Java or nonstandard solutions such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft's ActiveX.

Microsoft added a little-noticed feature called XMLHttpRequest to Internet Explorer in 1999, which enabled a web page to communicate with the server while remaining visible.

In spite of the success of Web 2.0 applications, the W3C forged ahead with their plan to replace HTML with XHTML and represent all data in XML.

[109] For the next several years, websites did not transition their content to XHTML; browser vendors did not adopt XHTML2; and developers eschewed XML in favor of JSON.

As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability.

Additionally, the integration of AI with IoT devices continues to improve their capabilities, allowing them to predict customer needs and perform tasks, increasing efficiency and user satisfaction.