Change History of the navigation bar of the Amazon website

It can be said that the Amazon website has popularized Tab-based navigation. Over the years, they have been exploring a user interface that allows them to clearly present more and more products to users. Now let's look back at the historical changes in navigation at the top of the Amazon website.
In 1998, Amazon had only two primary categories: books and music. Even with the addition of some categories, such as audio and video and gifts, horizontal Tab navigation can be expanded very smoothly, and different colors make it easy to differentiate products.
From 1999 to 2000, Amazon was still adding new categories, and its Tab navigation reached its limit. The addition of new product categories such as stores (zShops), toys and games, electrical appliances and e-cards makes Amazon's Logo useless, in addition, the page text is reduced accordingly (at that time, the page is still designed with a resolution of 800x600 ). We waited until we made the Tab into two rows to free up space for the Logo. Obviously, Tab-based navigation has been stretched to the limit and cannot be controlled.
In 2000, Amazon tried to remove all the tabs, but in 2001 it added Store directories and special Stores (Store Directory/Featured Stores ). This re-design replaces the increasing categories with special stores, and provides a convenient way for users to access the remaining stores. After the concept of "my stores" was proposed, Amazon once again returned to the single-line Tab navigation structure, and added the "see more stores" link to view more tabs.
From 2003 to 2004, Amazon continues to add new categories. However, for marketing and promotions, Tab navigation becomes shorter. Tab is based on the company's promotions and user behavior changes-increase or decrease. Few tabs will always be there (except "Welcome" and "Your Store "). Based on marketing and promotions, the graphic Tab is used, and the color changes during Tab switching become random.
To solve the problem caused by Tab changes, Amazon started to experiment with an alternative solution, that is, single-row dynamic Tab navigation (PPT ). In 2004, an online test was conducted to reduce the number of tabs to 2 (like the design in 1998 ). The first Tab is dynamic (it depends on your product category), and the second Tab is "all categories ". In a version in 2005, the navigation starts from two tabs and then inserts the current category as a new Tab. This replaces the previous solution and does not replace any current Tab.