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| Web Promotion FAQs |
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| FAQs : What is a web browser? |
You get access to the WWW through an application called a 'browser', like Netscape or Mosaic. To 'browse' is to search the WWW for information.
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When you sit down and look at web pages, you are using a web browser. This is the piece of software that communicates with web servers for you via the HTTP protocol, translates HTMLpages and image data into a nicely formatted on-screen display, and presents this information to your eyeballs -- or to your other senses, in the case of browsers for the vision-impaired and other alternative interface technologies. Web browsers also appear in simpler devices such as Internet-connected cell phones, like many Nokia models, and PDAs such as the Palm Pilot. |
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The most common web browser, by a large margin, is Microsoft Internet Explorer, followed by the open-source Mozilla browserand its derivatives, including Netscape 6.0 and later. Apple's new Safari browser is gaining popularity on Macintoshes running MacOS X, and the Operashareware browser has a loyal following among those who are willing to pay for the fastest browser possible, especially on older computers. The Lynx browser is the most frequently used text-only browser and has been adapted to serve the needs of the vision-impaired.
Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and first deployed a working system in 1990, did so by writing a web browser for the NeXTStep operating system. The original "WorldWideWeb" browser program had a graphical user interface and so on and is definitely recognizable to most people as a web browser. However, WorldWideWeb did not support graphics embedded in pages when it was first released. You can learn more about the original "WorldWideWeb" browser from Tim Berners-Lee himself.
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The first web browser to become truly popular and capture the imagination of the public was NCSA Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others who later went on to create the Netscape browser, NCSA Mosaic was the first to be available for Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh, and the Unix X Window System, which made it possible to bring the web to the average user. The first version appeared in March 1993. The "inline images," such as the boutell.com logo at the top of this page, that are an integral part of almost every web page today were introduced by NCSA Mosaic 2.0, in January of 1994. Mosaic 2.0 also introduced forms.
Netscape is the browser that introduced most all of the remaining major features that define a web browser as we know it. The first version of Netscape appeared in October 1994 under the code name "Mozilla." Netscape 1.0's early beta versions introduced the "progressive rendering" of pages and images, meaning that the page begins to appear and the text can be read even before all of the text and/or images have been completely downloaded. Version 1.1, in March 1995, introduced HTML tables, which are now used in the vast majority of web pages to provide page layout. Version 2.0, in October 1995, introduced frames, Java applets, and JavaScript. Version 2.0 was the last version of Netscape to introduce a major feature of the web as we know it today; later versions improved reliability and stability and introduced features that did not catch on as standards for all browsers. In 1998, Netscape decided to release their browser source code as open source software, and the Mozilla project began.
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Microsoft Internet Explorer is by far the most common web browser in use as of this writing. Internet Explorer 1.0, released in August 1995, broke no important new ground in a way that became part of a future standard. Later versions of Internet Explorer quickly caught up; Internet Explorer 3.0 was very close to Netscape 2.0's feature set. In July 1996, Internet Explorer 3.0 beta introduced the first useful implementation of cascading style sheets, which allow better control of the exact appearance of web pages. In April 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced the first quality implementation of the Document Object Model (DOM), which allows Javascript to modify the appearance and content of a web page after it has been loadedWeb servers are the computers that actually run web sites. The term "web server" also refers to the piece of software that runs on those computers, accepting HTTP connections from web browsers and delivering web pages and other files to them, as well as processing form submissions. The most common web server software is Apache, followed by Microsoft Internet Information server; many, many other web server programs also exist. For more information about web servers and how to arrange hosting for your own web pages, see the creating web sites section. |
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