Practice Safe Surfing

Abstract

It's hard to believe that the World Wide Web is almost 30 years old. While technically launched in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, most people didn't really know about it until the mid-1990s. The Web as we know it today really took off in the late 1990s with the ``dot-com'' boom and subsequent bust. We've come a long way since the early days of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator (the first popular web browsers). Web pages have gone from simple blocks of text and hyperlinks to amazingly powerful and complex websites that can do just about anything. Many of the tasks that were relegated to heavyweight software applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office are now moving into ``the cloud.'' With high-speed Internet connections and powerful new web technologies, there's so much you can now do within the confines of your web browser. In fact, Google has a whole operating system called Chrome OS that is essentially a web browser that acts as a full-fledged desktop operating system. (This OS is the basis for the popular and inexpensive Chromebook laptops.)