What is a Web Browser

A browser or web browser is a program that lets you view the information contained in a website (this is already hosted on a server within the World Wide Web or on a local one). The browser interprets the code, usually HTML, which is written in the web page and presents it on screen allowing the user to interact with its contents and navigate to other parts of the network through links or hyperlinks.

The basic functionality of a web browser is to allow the display of text documents, possibly with embedded multimedia. Documents can be located on the computer where the user is, but also can be in any other device that is connected to a user’s computer or Internet, and has the resources necessary for the transmission of documents (a software web server).

These documents, commonly known as web pages, have hyperlinks that link a portion of text or an image to another document, usually related to the text or image. The follow links between pages located on any computer connected to the Internet is called navigation; which is where the name browser originates. Furthermore, browser is a literal translation of the English original, browser, although its use is a minority.

The first browser, developed at CERN in late 1990 and early 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, was quite sophisticated and graphic, but only ran on NeXT station. The Mosaic browser, which worked initially in UNIX to X11 was the first to spread quickly because the NCSA developed for Windows and Macintosh versions. However, shortly afterwards it entered the market it quickly overtook Netscape Navigator at Mosaic capabilities and speed. This browser has the advantage of operating in almost all UNIX and Windows environments.

Estimated use in the period 1996-2006

Internet Explorer (formerly Spyglass Mosaic) was the late bid from Microsoft to enter the market and today has managed to unseat Netscape Navigator for Windows users. In recent years it has experienced a veritable explosion in the number of browsers, which offer increased integration with the surrounding windows in the running. Netscape Communications Corporation released the source code of its browser, and the Mozilla project was born.

Finally Mozilla was rewritten from scratch after deciding to develop and use the basis of a new cross-platform widget set based on XML called XUL. This made it take significantly longer to emerge than initially expected, popping a great quality version 1.0 for many platforms while on 5th June 2002. In late 2004, Firefox appeared on the market, a Mozilla development branch that sought to gain market share from Internet Explorer. It is a lighter browser than its older brother.

Operation browsers

The communication between web server and the browser is done via the HTTP protocol, while most browsers support other protocols such as FTP, Gopher and HTTPS (an encrypted version of HTTP-based Secure Socket Layer, or Secure Socket Layer (SSL )).
The main function of the browser is to download and display HTML documents on screen.

Today, not only discharged but such documents showing pictures, sounds and even videos in different formats and streaming protocols. They also allow the information stored on the disk or create bookmarks (bookmarks) from the most visited pages. Some of the most popular Web browsers are included in what is called a Suite. These suites have a number of integrated programs for reading Usenet news and email using NNTP protocols, IMAP and POP.

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 and interoperability problems on the web. The latest (Amaya, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera and recent versions of Internet Explorer) support HTML and XHTML standards (starting with HTML 4.01, which should be viewed in the same way). Web standards are published by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Current use of web browsers

Currently the most used browser in the world is Internet Explorer version 6. Some companies indicate that the advantage is that it comes integrated with Windows, behind it is the Mozilla Firefox browser, which is becoming increasingly popular.

Firefox is a serious competitor to the Microsoft product that already reaches 24% of the total market. Then there comes the version 7 of Internet Explorer, with a market share of just under 19.39% (all versions of Internet Explorer make up a 66% share of the market). Safari is another browser in rapid progression at above 4%. There are also the browsers: Netscape Navigator; Opera and Chrome which total 6%. Konqueror the KDE project exists in GNU/Linux and Epiphany’s official Gnome browser.