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Web browser

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A Web browser is a piece of software that enables a user to retrieve and render HTML documents from Internet servers around the world. This network of documents is known as the World Wide Web.

Communication between the web server and the browser uses primarily the HTTP protocol. Most browsers also support other protocols, such as FTP, Gopher, and HTTPS (a secure sockets layer encrypted version of HTTP). Web browsers are able to retrieve documents stored in other file formats or in streams using these other protocols, but also using HTTP. This allows the author to embed images, animations, video and sound into a web page, or to make them accessible through the web page.

Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support Usenet news and e-mail via the NNTP, IMAP and POP protocols. Most web browsers have the ability to save a file of bookmarks for sites you have or will want to visit often.

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 Web interoperability. Modern web browsers (such as Mozilla, Opera, and recent versions of Internet Explorer) support standards-based HTML and XHTML (starting with HTML 4.01), which should display in the same way across all browsers.

Tim Berners-Lee introduced the first web browser, named WorldWideWeb, on February 26, 1991.

Web browser features

Different browsers can be distinguished from eachother in terms of advancement by what features they support. Modern browsers and web pages tend to utilise far more features and technology than what was commonplace in the early days of the web. Most websites today are therefore understandably unreadable when viewed in early browsers. Competition between Netscape Communications Corporation and Microsoft for browser market-share in the mid 1990s helped oversee a rapid expansion of what a browser could do. The following is a list of some of these elements:

Examples of web browsers

Text-based web browsers:

Early browsers which are no longer developed:

See also History of the Internet.

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