Reading: Web Browser

Introduction

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) 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.
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, Internet Explorer,
Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari.
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.

Marc Andreessen, inventor of Netscape

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”, 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 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.
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. 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 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. 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. Chrome’s user-base continued to grow and in
May 2012, Chrome’s usage passed the usage of all versions
of Internet Explorer combined. By April 2014, Chrome’s
usage had hit 45%.
Internet Explorer will be deprecated in Windows 10, with
Microsoft Edge replacing it as the default web browser.
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.
Netscape Navigator was sold commercially, as was Opera.
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.”
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.
Today, most commercial web browsers are paid by search
engine companies to make their engine default, or to include
them as another option. For example, Google pays Mozilla,
the maker of Firefox, to make Google Search the default
search engine in Firefox. Mozilla makes enough money from
this deal that it does not need to charge users for Firefox. In
addition, Google Search is also (as one would expect) the
default search engine in Google Chrome. Users searching
for websites or items on the Internet would be led to
Google’s search results page, increasing ad revenue and
which funds development at Google and of Google Chrome.
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
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).  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
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.
 Browser bookmarks
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

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:
• 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.
• 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, 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.