Browser

From Saferpedia

Browser - software that display data using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in WWW.

History

Web browser's history starts in the late 80s when a variety of technologies founded the first web browser, WorldWideWeb by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991.

In 1993 appeared the Mosaic NCSA web browser - one of the first graphic web browsers. The leader of the Mosaic team Marc Andreessen opened its own company, Netscape and launched in 1994 Netscape Navigator which and became fast the most popular browser in the world.

In 1995 Microsoft launched Internet Explorer so starting the first browsers war. By grouping Internet Explorer wit Windows OS, Microsoft reached to dominate by taking over the web browsers' market. It reached the maximum market share, over 95% in 2002. Since then IE only reached 65% according to Net applications.

In 1996 the Opera web browser appeared on the market. Although it never reached a large scale of use, with only 2% of the market in October 2009, Opera holds an important market share in mobile phones browsers. It is also available on joysticks and video games like Nintendo and Wii.

In 1998, Netscape launched what was going to become the Mozilla foundation, trying to produce a competitive browser using open source model. That browser became the Firefox browser nowadays. Sine October 2009, Firefox holds a market share of 24%.

In September 2008 was launched Google Chrome, the Google web browser. Starting with October 2009 they hold a market share of 4%.

Operation

The main purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This starts when the user inserts an URI, for example: http://ro.saferpedia.eu/wiki/Pagina_principal%C4%83.

If the resource has the prefix http, https, file, etc. once it was extracted the web browser will display it. HTML is parsed to web browser's engine to be transformed from a markup to an interactive document. Besides HTML, web browsers can display almost any type of content. Most browser can display images, videos, audio files, XML and have plugins supporting Flash applications and Java applets.

Resources may contain links to other resources, each link including an URI of a resource to address to. When the link is clicked the browser navigates to the identified source trough its target.

Features

Available web browsers vary in features starting form text interface to user interface which support a variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers including additional components for e-mail support, news, Usenet and IRC are sometimes called "Internet Suites".

Most web browsers allow the user to open several resources at the same time either in different windows or different tabs of the same window.

User interface

Almost all major web browsers have the following common elements:

Buttons "Go forward" and "Go back";
"Refresh" or "Reload" button;
"Stop" button;
"Home" button;
Address bar to insert the URI of the wanted resources;
Search bar;
Status bar to display the loading process.

Privacy and Security

Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer fast and simple means to delete the cache memory, cookies and surf history.

Supported standards

At the beginning web browser supported just a simple version of HTML. Fast developments of web browsers led to developing non-standard HTML dialects, fact that led to interoperability problems. Modern browsers support a combination of base standards HTML and XHTML which should be interpreted the same by all browsers.

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