Web Design History Timeline 2009-2017

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2009 February 9^th

Facebook “like” button

The internet social networking site Facebook introduced its “like button” feature for the first time. Clicking the button with a thumb up icon indicates a user's positive reaction to the content of the web page on which the button is located. In 2011, Google introduced a similar button to mark one’s favorite content called the +1 button for its Google+ social network.
2009 March

BEM

In 2005, a team of developers of the Russian search engine Yandex began working on a new methodology that allowed for unambiguous naming of classes in CSS. In 2009, the new CSS naming convention was called BEM, standing for Block, Element, Modifier.
2009 June

Less 1.0

Alexis Sellier designed a CSS preprocessor called Less 1.0, a dynamic styling language for cascading styles. The Less language was influenced by the existing Sass preprocessor. Less adds variables, mixins, arithmetic calculations, nesting rules and functions to the CSS syntax.
2009 July 8^th

Dribbble.com

Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett founded the Dribbble design community portal. Graphic designers, illustrators, web designers, typographers, and other related creative professionals can share their work on Dribbble in 400x300 px. Dribbble is currently the largest community website for designers.
2009 July 23^rd

CSS Flexible Box Layout

W3C issued the first proposal of the CSS Flexible box layout (Flexbox) specification. Flexbox introduces a new way of creating web layout, an easier alignment of elements and a better distribution of space with respect to the device's display resolution. Flexbox features are currently supported in most major browsers.
2009 September 9^th

Typekit

Small Batch launched a cloud library of web fonts called Typekit. Typekit works on a subscription basis and offers an extensive font library that developers can place on a website using the @font-face CSS rule. In October 2011, Typekit was purchased by Adobe Systems.
2009 September 23^rd

The CSS Awards

A prestigious gallery of highly creative and innovative CSS-based websites in terms of design was launched under the name CSS Awards. The portal gives awards in several categories based on the vote of the community of visitors and a panel of judges. On February 24, 2011, the portal was named Awwwards, and as of 2014, it holds regular conferences.
2009 November 14^th

Zune Media Player and Flat Design

Microsoft started selling the first model of the Zune handheld multimedia player. The simple and clean design of Zune control features is considered to be one of the first uses of flat design in user interface.
2010 April 8^th

WOFF 1.0

Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and Microsoft submitted a proposal for the specification of a new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to the W3C. The WOFF fonts are currently supported by all major browsers.
2010 May 19^th

Google Web Fonts

Google launched an open source web font library, Google Web Fonts (now called Google Fonts). Fonts are hosted on Google's servers, and the library now has nearly 900 font families that users can use on their websites for free.
2010 May 25^th

Responsive Web Design

Web designer Ethan Marcotte published an article entitled "Responsive Web Design" in the online magazine A List Apart. The author describes a new way of styling HTML documents which allows for an optimization of website content display with regard to resolution or display size. Basic responsive web design techniques include fluid grid, flexible images, and CSS3 module media queries.
2010 September 7^th

Sketch 1.0

The Dutch company Bohemian Coding released the vector graphics editor Sketch 1.0. Sketch is designed for MacOS only and has gained a lot of popularity among the web design community over the recent years.
2010 October 21^st

Flat design and Windows Phone 7

Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7, a mobile phone whose user interface was created using flat design. The new visual style received positive feedback, and Microsoft used flat design elements in the design of the Windows 8 graphics interface. Flat design has also gained considerable popularity among web designers and has become one of the major visual trends in web design after 2010 along with skeuomorphism and material design styles.
2011 January 31^st

Stylus 0.0.1, by TJ Holowaychuk

TJ Holowaychuk created a dynamic styling language for cascading styles, Stylus 0.0.1. The CSS preprocessor Stylus syntax was based on the existing Sass and Less preprocessors.
2011 August 19^th

Bootstrap 1

Web developers Mark Otto and Jacob Thorton of Twitter began creating the CSS framework Bootstrap in mid-2011. The framework was originally developed to help maintain the HTML/CSS and JavaScript code consistency in Twitter applications. In August 2011, Bootstrap 1 was released as an open source tool and is currently one of the most popular CSS frameworks among web designers. In January 2012, Bootstrap 2 was released, supporting a responsive web layout.
2012 June 19^th

Media Queries

W3C issued an official recommendation for Media Queries specification. The CSS3 Media Queries module allows for adaptable web page rendering based on various factors such as screen resolution or size. Media Queries are one of the basic techniques used in designing responsive sites.
2013 August 19^th

Bootstrap 3

A team of developers from GitHub published the CSS framework Boostrap 3. The new Bootstrap version consistently applied a responsive web layout and mobile-first access. The layout of templates and components was redesigned in flat design style.
2014 June 25^th

Material Design

Google introduced a new graphic style called Material Design at the Google I/O conference. Since 2015, Google has redesigned most of its applications and services using the consistent visual style of Material Design. According to Google's definition, Material Design is a "visual language that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and the possibility of technology and science.”
2014 October 28^th

HTML5

W3C adopted the final recommendation for the HTML5 markup language. The HTML5 version has brought an improved browser multimedia playback support, new semantic tags that better define page structure, offline application support, and the <canvas> tag that can interpret vector graphics with an option to insert images.
2015 March 30^th

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft released the first version of the Microsoft Edge web browser for Windows 10. Microsoft Edge was subsequently included as a default browser on Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One operating systems, definitively replacing the older Internet Explorer 11 and Internet Explorer Mobile browsers. On December 6, 2018, Microsoft announced that Edge will no longer use its own EdgeHTML rendering engine and will be based on Chromium, Google's open source rendering engine.
2017 June 25^th

Adobe announced termination of Flash

Adobe Systems announced that it would cease support for Flash in 2020 and would no longer issue additional security updates for Adobe Flash Player. In the field of web multimedia and interactivity, Flash became gradually replaced by HTML5, WebGL, or WebAssembly technology.