Loading...
Global search
Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
6 Reasons the Listicle Ruled 2010
Cracked.com, the former humour magazine, was at its peak in 2010 with numbered list articles about history, science and pop culture that were funnier and better researched than they had any right to...
The internet's meme encyclopedia
Know Your Meme documented the origin and spread of memes with the seriousness of an encyclopedia and the deadpan of a science show. Started by the Rocketboom video blog in 2008, it was the reference...
The comics that lived in Google Reader
xkcd's stick-figure science jokes, The Oatmeal's ranting infographics and Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half were among the most-shared things on the 2010 web, spreading through RSS, StumbleUpon and...
The plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
The Windows people actually liked, one year old
Windows 7 shipped in October 2009 and by the end of 2010 ran roughly a quarter of the world's desktop web traffic, while Windows XP still ran about half. Its Aero glass window borders, the new...
Multitasking, folders, and a new name
Apple renamed iPhone OS to iOS with version 4, released on 21 June 2010. It added multitasking (in a limited form), home-screen folders, wallpapers, a unified inbox, FaceTime on the iPhone 4, and...
Flash on a phone, tethering, and a huge speed boost
Android 2.2, announced at Google I/O in May 2010, made Android phones two to five times faster with a JIT compiler, added Wi-Fi hotspot tethering, Chrome-to-Phone, apps on the SD card, and,...
The default browser of Windows 7 and roughly a third of the web
Internet Explorer 8, bundled with Windows 7, was the single most-used browser version of 2010. It had tabs, a separate search box beside the address bar, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and a...
The alternative browser with a thousand extensions
Firefox 3.6, released on 21 January 2010, was the browser of choice for people who cared, with about 30 percent of worldwide usage. It added Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster...
The fast newcomer with tabs on top and one box for everything
Chrome went from about 5 percent of worldwide browser usage at the start of 2010 to roughly 15 percent by December. Version 4 added extensions in January, version 5 in May was the first stable...
DSL or cable, a few megabits, and a router with WEP
About two-thirds of American adults had home broadband in 2010, according to Pew, mostly DSL or cable at speeds of a few megabits per second; the FCC's National Broadband Plan set a target of 4 Mbps...
A megabit or two on a good day, and the end of unlimited
Most smartphones in 2010 used 3G networks that delivered a megabit or two in practice, enough for email, Facebook and a slow YouTube video. AT&T ended unlimited data for new iPhone customers in June...
Nine years old and still the most-used OS on Earth
Windows XP, released in 2001, was still the most common desktop operating system in 2010, running about half of the world's desktop web traffic. Its green Start button and rolling-hills wallpaper...
The one everyone skipped
Windows Vista, released to consumers in 2007, was widely disliked for its User Account Control prompts, driver problems and heavy hardware needs. By 2010 it was already being replaced by Windows 7 on...
The $29 upgrade with no new features, and the Mac App Store on the way
Snow Leopard, released in August 2009 for $29, was the Mac OS of 2010: brushed-metal was gone, the Dock was a 3D shelf, Exposé and Spaces managed windows, and Safari 5 arrived in June. In October...
The portal: mail, news, Answers and Flickr
Yahoo! was still one of the most-visited sites on Earth in 2010, thanks to Yahoo Mail, the news-heavy portal homepage, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Yahoo Finance. Under CEO Carol Bartz, it handed its...
Linux for people, with a new purple theme
Ubuntu 10.04, released in April 2010, was the Linux distribution most likely to be found on a netbook or a curious student's dual-boot laptop. It introduced a purple-and-orange theme, moved window...
The version that lingered for years
Android 2.3 Gingerbread arrived on the Nexus S in December 2010 with a darker, cleaner interface, a better keyboard, NFC support and copy-and-paste improvements. Because so many cheap phones shipped...
PINs, the D and the R, and free unlimited messaging
BBM let BlackBerry owners message each other free over the data plan, with delivered and read receipts, group chats and PIN-swapping as a social ritual. In 2010 it was a major reason teenagers in the...
Metro live tiles and a fresh start for Microsoft
Windows Phone 7 replaced the stylus-era Windows Mobile with a flat, typographic interface of live tiles and hubs, launching in October and November 2010. Reviewers admired the design and noted the...
The world's most-used smartphone OS, and nobody in Silicon Valley cared
Symbian, the operating system on Nokia's smartphones, still had the largest share of smartphone sales worldwide in 2010, about 37.6 percent according to Gartner, ahead of Android at 22.7 percent. It...
Hardware acceleration and HTML5, in a minimal new frame
Released on 15 September 2010, the IE9 beta was Microsoft's answer to Chrome: a stripped-back interface with tabs beside the address bar, GPU-accelerated rendering, and real HTML5 and CSS3 support....
Nine years old, still used by millions, hated by developers
IE6, released in 2001, still had a meaningful share of browser use in 2010 (around a tenth worldwide, concentrated in China and corporate offices). Google dropped support for it in Docs and Gmail in...
The browser that made feature-phone internet bearable
Opera Mini compressed pages on Opera's servers before sending them to the phone, which made it the most-used mobile browser in the world in 2010, especially on feature phones in India, Indonesia,...
The social browser backed by Marc Andreessen
RockMelt, released as a beta in November 2010, was a Chromium-based browser with Facebook friends down the left edge and feeds down the right, built on the idea that the browser should be social. It...
Yahoo, Google, Ask, AVG, MyWebSearch... stacked five deep
Toolbars were the plague of the 2010 browser: bundled with Java updates, antivirus software and free downloads, they stacked below the address bar until the page was a slit. The Ask Toolbar, Google...
Reader mode and extensions, in brushed aluminium
Safari 5, released on 7 June 2010 for Mac and Windows, added Reader (a clean article view), extensions, Bing as a search option and a faster Nitro JavaScript engine. On the Mac it was the default, on...
Small share, big ideas: Turbo, Speed Dial and tab stacking
Opera had only around 2 percent of desktop browser usage in 2010 but kept inventing features others copied: Speed Dial, mouse gestures, Opera Turbo compression, and, in Opera 11 in December, tab...
The web ran on plugins, and every one of them wanted an update
In 2010 the browser was a host for plugins: Flash for video and games, Java for RuneScape and bank sites, Silverlight for Netflix, QuickTime and RealPlayer for media, Adobe Reader for PDFs. Each...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
Write less, do more: the JavaScript library on most of the web
jQuery 1.4, released in January 2010, was the JavaScript library almost every site used to animate menus, load content with Ajax and paper over browser differences, especially Internet Explorer's....
Ethan Marcotte names the idea, May 2010
On 25 May 2010, Ethan Marcotte published "Responsive Web Design" in A List Apart, combining fluid grids, flexible images and CSS media queries into one approach. Before it, most sites served a...
Free web fonts for everyone, launched at Google I/O
Google launched its Font API and directory in May 2010 with 18 open-source typefaces, including Lobster, Droid Sans, Yanone Kaffeesatz and Inconsolata. Alongside Typekit (2009), it ended the era when...
JavaScript on the server, one year old
Node.js, presented by Ryan Dahl in 2009, reached version 0.2 in 2010 and npm, its package manager, was first published in January 2010. Backbone.js, CoffeeScript and the first Node web frameworks...
Ten thousand coins for two pizzas
Bitcoin was a year old and worth almost nothing in 2010. On 22 May, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first recorded purchase with the currency. The Mt. Gox exchange opened in July,...
The Firefox extension that hijacked Facebook sessions on café Wi-Fi
Released on 24 October 2010, Firesheep let anyone on the same open Wi-Fi network click into other people's Facebook, Twitter and Amazon sessions, because those sites only encrypted the login page. It...
The Ribbon everywhere, and Office Web Apps in the browser
Office 2010, released to consumers on 15 June 2010, put the Ribbon interface in every application, added the Backstage file view, and launched free Office Web Apps that ran Word, Excel and PowerPoint...
Content-Aware Fill, and Flash CS5's blocked iPhone exporter
Adobe CS5, released in April 2010, brought Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill (the demo video went viral), 64-bit Photoshop on the Mac, and Dreamweaver's CSS improvements. Flash CS5 could compile Flash...
The tiny BitTorrent client on every second PC
µTorrent was the lightweight BitTorrent client most people used in 2010 to download Linux ISOs, and everything else. Its green-and-white window of progress bars, seeds and peers was as familiar as...
"There's an app for that": 300,000 apps and counting
Apple's App Store passed 300,000 apps in late 2010 and had served billions of downloads since opening in 2008; the American Dialect Society named "app" its word of the year. Top sellers included...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
