Technology at its Best

When the internet or Arpa Net as it was called started out the designers did not realise the full potential, even to this day designers and developers are finding new uses and new ways of giving the public a more user friendly system.

The original designers did not feel that the internet would be required to carry much information and designed it for occasional file transfer or text messages similar to Hyper Terminal. In this day and age with a system that is permanently on and the user always connected a faster and more tactile application was required for ease of use.

The Browser became the user’s portal to the internet, when the concept of the browser was conceived the two leading companies were Microsoft with their Internet Explorer and Netscape with their self named application. At the outset both applications had "back doors" that allowed pop up adverts to be placed on the users screen, internet marketing companies were quick to exploit such vulnerabilities, everything for chocolate to cheap air fares began to appear on the users screen. Realising that these were becoming a nuisance to the users Microsoft enhanced internet explorer to block pop up adverts and to monitor for other exploitation.

Realising that the public craved to communicate with others it didn't take long for them to create new methods of making that contact. Soon the social network was created, allowing people to contact others with common interests or backgrounds. Whether you had been at school together, worked in the same company or had the same interests the social network allowed you to get in touch.

Social networks such as My Space and Facebook were designed for the most commonly used browser, Internet Explorer, users of other browsers such as Opera orFirefox found that some aspects of the social network sites did not work as well as expected. Such was the draw of these sites people started to move back to internet explorer. Naturally the developers of the browsers that were suffering did not appreciate this move so soon started "patching" their applications to be more accommodating to the scripts used in the social networks.