Loading...
Global search
Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Servers somewhere else; the 2010 buzzword for storing files and running software online.
the cloud: Servers somewhere else; the 2010 buzzword for storing files and running software online. Example: "it's all in the cloud now"
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...
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...
One button, endless rooftops
Canabalt, made by Adam Saltsman in 2009 for a Flash game jam, invented the one-button endless runner: a man in a suit sprinting across rooftops as a city collapses. In 2010 it was on every...
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October 2010 a federal court injunction forced it to stop...
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 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 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...
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...
The former Ask Jeeves gives up on search
Ask.com, once Ask Jeeves with its butler mascot, still had a few percent of US searches in 2010, largely through toolbars bundled with downloads. In November 2010 it announced it was leaving the...
Hosted WordPress, and the software running the blogosphere
WordPress powered a large share of the blogs and news sites of 2010, and WordPress.com offered hosted blogs with themes and stats for free. WordPress 3.0, released in June 2010, merged the multi-site...
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....
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...
Gingerbread and the first NFC Android phone
The Samsung-made Nexus S launched on 16 December 2010 as the first phone with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and an NFC chip, years before contactless payments mattered. Its curved "Contour Display" and...
Press the red button, flip out the USB plug
The Flip Video, owned by Cisco since 2009, was the pocket camcorder of 2010: a big red record button, a flip-out USB connector and one-click YouTube uploads. Millions were sold before smartphone...
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...
A permanent injunction won by the record labels forced LimeWire to disable its file-sharing software, ending the most popular P2P client of the MP3 era.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
