Web Browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.
Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems. The major web browsers are Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
History
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb (no spaces) and was later renamed Nexus.
In 1993, browser software was further innovated Marc Andreessen with the release of Mosaic (later Netscape), "the world's first popular browser",
which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to
the average person. Andreesen's browser sparked the internet boom of
the 1990s.
The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 – one of the first graphical web
browsers – led to an explosion in web use. Andreessen, the leader of the
Mosaic team at NCSA, soon started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak (see usage share of web browsers).
Microsoft responded with its Internet Explorer in 1995, also heavily influenced by Mosaic, initiating the industry's first browser war. Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer gained dominance in the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.
Opera
debuted in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, having
less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net
Applications.
Its Opera-mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting
to 1.1% of overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.
In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta
stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late
2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7% of browser use. As of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of April 2011, it had a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 7% of the entire browser market.
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Chrome,
first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased
significantly year on year, by doubling its usage share from 8% to 16%
by August 2011. This increase seems largely to be at the expense of
Internet Explorer, whose share has tended to decrease from month to
month. In December 2011, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser.However, when all versions of Internet Explorer are put together, IE is still most popular.
Function
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information
resources to the user ("retrieval" or "fetching"), allow them to view
the information ("display", "rendering"), and then access other
information ("navigation", "following links").
This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URL, the Uniform Resource Identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.
In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML and associated content (image files, formatting information such as CSS, etc.) is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup
to an interactive document, a process known as "rendering". Aside from
HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be
part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and
XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets.
Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set
up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user
to save the file to disk.
Information resources may contain hyperlinks
to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a
resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the
resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing
content to the user begins again.
Features
For more details on this topic, see Comparison of web browsers.
Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based
user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces
supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which
include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".
All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information
resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in
different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.
Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed. In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.
Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.
User interface
Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:
- Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward respectively.
- A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.
- A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is merged with the reload button.
- A home button to return to the user's home page.
- An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it.
- A search bar to input terms into a search engine. In some browsers, the search bar is merged with the address bar.
- A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.
Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.
Privacy and security
Main article: Browser security
Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, cookies, and browsing history. For a comparison of the current security vulnerabilities of browsers, see comparison of web browsers.
Standards support
Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The
rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of
non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with
interoperability. Modern web browsers support a combination of standards-based and de facto HTML and XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers.
Extensibility
A browser extension is a computer program that extends the functionality of a web browser. Every major web browser supports the development of browser extensions.
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