From Humble Beginnings
It’s easy to forget certain things when you use them everyday and don’t notice the changes they encounter over time. Every-time a new update for an app comes out there’s a flood of people willing to jump in a fire for the changes to be reversed. What most users don’t realize is that it’s these small updates that give applications like Netflix the chance to go from how it looked in 2002 to now.

Over the weekend I came across an interesting reddit post that linked to a website named https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/netflix-2002. This website outlines a large number of famous websites from 20 years ago to today and their change in appearance throughout the years.
Remember this?:

Youtube today:

When browsing this website I came across Netflix. I’m lucky enough to have remembered Netflix when it was first a movie delivery service. You’d rent which movies you wanted and they’d get mailed to you with no late fees.
Pre Netflix and Chill potential:


What I find really interesting about Netflix is that while Web Developers began to partake in different implementations, they decided to switch the focus of their product around streaming as opposed to the traditional physical format.
Which allowed the product to now look like this:

We have a lot to thank for the evolution of web applications. One of the biggest contributors to the fluent web apps we have today is CSS. Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) was originally developed in 1994 by Hakon Wium Lie. Although created in ’94 it will be a long road ahead before CSS will become a huge part of web development. CSS gives websites the ability to be styled in a variety of different ways. Although a powerful tool. Developers hadn’t began putting it into everyday practice until it had full browser support. This didn’t happen for close to another 10 years after its creation. For a long time designers relied on a backlog of browser hacks, table based layouts, and embedded flash files. CSS based design was new territory. Some of the first big companies to implement CSS design were ESPN and Wired magazine in 2002. It wasn’t long before the rest of the developer community got up to speed with CSS and as a result we have immersive web apps such as Twitter, Youtube, and Reddit.
More example:
Google 1998:

Google now:

Ebay then:

Ebay now:

Sources: