GMail was pretty impressive in 2004 too. It probably sounds banal now, but not having to constantly delete emails was game changing at the time. I still have access to email going back to 2004 and I find myself looking up things I received over a decade ago.

Ah, you are right. Gmail is amazing. I somehow thought it was released before 2003.

I think the big thing that happened around that time that marked the sunset of the Golden Age of Google was Google Books (launched 2003) and critically the response. It was the last large, ambitious project of theirs that really aligned with the old "organise the world's information and make it useful" mission, and from Google's perspective was clearly a no-brainer Good Thing for the world.

And instead of the same enthusiastic reaction at large they had become used to, they got _hammered_ for it by publishers and dragged into court. I do wonder if that turned into a fundamental cultural inflection point for them.

2007 saw Google Street View. Not a independent product, but a massive innovation even if it ended up a maps feature.

Same year they introduced Android, another decent success.

> tech itself was invented by MS

You could load to IFrame (but then have to rewrite it in IE for some reason, NS was fine with that - if knowing a way to avoid that layout flush bug after resize..) years before that, as I did.

In my opinion XMLHttpRequest made more damage than help by forcing JS as the only way of doing similar things instead of letting bugs that what was there already to be fixed - so now, you can not even imagine, I guess, how all that could be different - mostly without need of JS and browser able to handle it..