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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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,...
Free games, and the school-computer favourite
Miniclip was where school computer labs went to play 8 Ball Pool, Club Penguin's ancestors and hundreds of other Flash games. In 2010 it claimed tens of millions of monthly players and was expanding...
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...
What most of the world actually carried
Smartphones were still a minority in 2010: roughly one in five phones sold worldwide that year was a smartphone, according to Gartner. Most people carried feature phones, from Nokia candybars and...
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...
Disney's virtual world for kids
Club Penguin was the safe, moderated virtual world where children waddled around as penguins, played mini-games and decorated igloos. Disney had bought it in 2007, and in 2010 it was one of the...
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....
Where filmmakers uploaded in HD
Vimeo was the arty alternative to YouTube in 2010: cleaner pages, HD playback, no ads in the player, and a community of designers, animators and indie filmmakers. Its first Vimeo Awards took place in...
Blogspot blogs with orange Bs
Blogger, Google-owned since 2003, hosted millions of free blogspot.com blogs in 2010, from personal diaries to recipe blogs to the MP3 blogs of the music-download era. A template designer launched in...
Random strangers, webcam to webcam
Chatroulette paired you with a random stranger over webcam and let either of you hit Next. Built by 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy in late 2009, it exploded in February and March 2010, inspired piano...
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 torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
A touchscreen slider running BlackBerry 6
Launched in August 2010 on AT&T, the Torch combined a slide-out keyboard with a touchscreen and the new BlackBerry 6 operating system with a WebKit browser. It was RIM's answer to the iPhone at a...
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...
The suicide mission
BioWare's Mass Effect 2, released on 26 January 2010, opened the year with one of its most acclaimed games: a squad-recruiting space opera whose final mission could kill your favourite characters...
Guy Fawkes masks, LOIC, and the WikiLeaks payment war
Anonymous, the loose collective born on 4chan, spent 2010 attacking anti-piracy groups and then, in December, the companies that cut off WikiLeaks: PayPal, Visa and MasterCard. Thousands of...
Microsoft's IE9 beta brought hardware-accelerated graphics, HTML5 support and a minimal Chrome-like interface, but would not run on Windows XP.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Google disclosed that its modified Toyota Priuses had driven 140,000 miles on public roads with minimal human intervention, the first public word of the project that became Waymo.
Google revealed that it had been hit by a sophisticated attack from China (Operation Aurora) and said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, setting up its...
BioWare's acclaimed space opera opened the year's run of major game releases and went on to win many game-of-the-year awards.
In Operation Payback, Anonymous volunteers used the LOIC tool to knock the websites of companies that had cut off WikiLeaks offline for hours.
