The online experience of the mid-’90s was very different from what we enjoy today. Watching web pages slowly render over a 28.8 modem connection defined the Internet experience of the 20th century. Faster network connections and a technology called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) freed web surfers from having to wait for the next web page. The result is a fast, responsive, and highly interactive online experience that didn’t exist 15 years ago.

Like many aspects of the Internet, the development of AJAX happened in starts and fits over many years and with many contributors. AJAX was introduced slowly and only recently has received wide acceptance by developers. In 1995—even before the term AJAX existed—Microsoft created an ActiveX control that facilitated XMLHTTP in Internet Explorer 5. This control was among the technologies, along with DHTML, that allowed developers to download and manipulate online content without the need for a page refresh. This technology later found support by other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest object. The W3C created the official web standard for AJAX in 2006. Since that time, AJAX has gained wide acceptance by web developers and has become a major concern (that is, a headache) for webbot developers.