subject: What To Know About Web Browsers [print this page] A person who uses Internet has surely used a browser which is the computer software that retrieves, represents, and traverses digital information resources found on the worldwideweb. The information resource is classified by a uniform resource identifier or URI and these could be an image, video, web page or any piece of digital content. The hyperlinks found in these information resources allow users to navigate easily the browsers to the communicated resources.
The browser starts functioning once the user types in a URI. The prefix (in the example, it is "http") of the URI defines how the given URI is interpreted. The most common prefix used for a URI is "http" which determines that the information resource is to be regained through the hypertext transfer protocol.
There are other prefixes that are supported by browsers such as "https" (hypertext transfer protocol secure), "ftp" (file transfer protocol) and "file" (local files). If a prefix cannot be handled directly by a browser, the request is sent off entirely to another application. An example is the "mailto:" prefix where the URI is often passed to the default email application of the user and the "news:" prefix where the URI is often passed to the default news group reader of the user.
The first browser to be launched successfully was called Mosaic which was programmed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen in 1992 and released by 1993. During these years, the graphical services found online which are popular and dominating were from America Online (AOL), Prodigy and Compuserv. These online servicing companies do not provide Internet access.
Through Mosaic, the Internet was opened for use of the common people. It gives easier ways to navigate and explore the WWW and it is free. By mid-90's, Andreessen made a partnership with the former initiator of Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark and Netscape was born.
Netscape became the number one browser for a while until Microsoft started pre-packaging its Internet Explorer into its Windows operating systems. Microsoft's Internet Explorer or IE was way behind Netscape in a lot of ways. IE had been criticized because of its abundant bugs, security problems and lack of conventionality to the standard protocols of the Internet. However, since a lot of new computer and internet users are unaware and unconcern of these risks, IE became the top choice for browser by 1998.
Netscape allowed the release of the source code of its browser the very same year. Because of this, the browser was rewritten with substantial changes over the years that followed. Afterwards, Mozilla, an open source type of browser, was born under Mozilla Organization.
Mozilla Organization, which was owned by AOL until it gave up its power to supervise, was renamed to Mozilla Foundation and also renamed to Phoenix the browser and later on to FireFox which is now known famously.
Aside from IE and FireFox, other famous browsers at present are Opera, Apple Safari and Google Chrome.
A web browser is primarily used to gain access to the worldwideweb. A browser can also be used to gain information access given by the web servers of private networks or files found in file systems.
