Web browser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A
web browser (commonly referred to as a
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/URL) that may be a
web page, image, video or other piece of content.
[1] Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their
browsers to related resources.
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 most popular web browsers are
Google Chrome,
Microsoft Edge (preceded by
Internet Explorer),
[2][3][4] Safari,
Opera and
Firefox.
History
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
which oversees the Web's continued development, and is also the founder
of the World Wide Web Foundation. His browser was called
WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus.
[5]
The first commonly available web browser with a graphical user interface was
Erwise. The development of Erwise was initiated by
Robert Cailliau.
In 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreessen with the release of
Mosaic, "the world's first popular browser",
[6]
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.
[6]
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
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (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.
[7]
Opera
debuted in 1996; it has never achieved widespread use, having less than
2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net
Applications.
[9]
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.
[7] As of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.
[9]
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.
[9]
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is
Chrome,
first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased
significantly year by 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.
[10] In December 2011, Chrome overtook
Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser but still had lower usage than all versions of Internet Explorer combined.
[11]
Chrome's user-base continued to grow and in May 2012, Chrome's usage
passed the usage of all versions of Internet Explorer combined.
[12] By April 2014, Chrome's usage had hit 45%.
[13]
Internet Explorer was deprecated in
Windows 10, with
Microsoft Edge replacing it as the default web browser.
[14]
Business models
The ways that web browser makers fund their development costs has
changed over time. The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was a research
project.
In addition to being
freeware, Netscape Navigator and Opera were also sold commercially.
Internet Explorer, on the other hand, was bundled free with the
Windows operating system (and was also downloadable free), and therefore
it was funded partly by the sales of Windows to computer manufacturers
and direct to users. Internet Explorer also used to be available for the
Mac. It is likely that releasing IE for the Mac was part of Microsoft's
overall strategy to fight threats to its quasi-monopoly platform
dominance – threats such as web standards and Java – by making some web
developers, or at least their managers, assume that there was "no need"
to develop for anything other than Internet Explorer. In this respect,
IE may have contributed to Windows and Microsoft applications sales in
another way, through "
lock-in" to Microsoft's browser.
In January 2009, the European Commission announced it would
investigate the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows operating
systems from Microsoft, saying "Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer
to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers,
undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice."
Microsoft Corp v Commission[15][16]
Safari and Mobile Safari were likewise always included with OS X and
iOS respectively, so, similarly, they were originally funded by sales of
Apple computers and mobile devices, and formed part of the overall
Apple experience to customers.
Some commercial web browsers are paid by search engine companies to
make their engine default, or to include them as another option. For
example,
Yahoo! pays
Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, to make
Yahoo! Search
the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla makes enough money from
this deal that it does not need to charge users for Firefox. By virtue
of common ownership,
Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome default to their respective vendors' own search engines,
Bing and
Google Search,
and may integrate with other platforms offered by the vendor. This
encourages the use of their first-party services, which in turn, exposes
users to advertising that can be used as a source of revenue.
Many less-well-known
free software browsers, such as
Konqueror, were hardly funded at all and were developed mostly by volunteers free of charge.
Function
Most used web browser by country, as of May 2012.
Most used web browser by country, as of June 2015.
No info
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information
resources to the user ("retrieval" or "fetching"), allowing 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).
[17] 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.
Market share
Features
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".
[19][20][21]
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.
[22][23][24][25]
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.
[26] In
Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.
[27]
Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via
plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.
User interface
Some home media devices now include web browsers, like this
LG Smart TV. The browser is controlled using an on-screen keyboard and LG's "Magic Motion" remote.
Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:
[28]
- 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 web 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.
- The viewport, the visible area of the webpage within the browser window.
- The ability to view the HTML source for a page.
Major browsers also possess
incremental find features to search within a web page.
Privacy and security
Most browsers support
HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, download history, form and search history,
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.
Components
Web browsers consist of a user interface,
layout engine,
rendering engine, JavaScript interpreter, UI backend, networking
component and data persistence component. These components achieve
different functionalities of a web browser and together provide all
capabilities of a web browser.
[29]
See also
References
Usage share of web browsers according to StatCounter
An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet
Internet portal
The first commonly available web browser with a graphical user interface was Erwise. The development of Erwise was initiated by Robert Cailliau.Marc Andreessen, inventor of Netscape Navigator
Opera debuted in 1996; it has never achieved widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net Applications.[9] 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.
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user ("retrieval" or "fetching"), allowing them to view the information ("display", "rendering"), and then access other information ("navigation", "following links").Most used web browser by country, as of June 2015.No info
Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:[28]Some home media devices now include web browsers, like this LG Smart TV. The browser is controlled using an on-screen keyboard and LG's "Magic Motion" remote.
Media related to Web browsers at Wikimedia Commons
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