A web browser is a software program that interprets the World Wide Web’s coding language in graphical form, displaying the translation instead of the encoding. This allows anyone to “surf the web” through simple point-and-click navigation, avoiding the need to know the commands used in software languages.
A close-up of a web browser’s address bar.
The World Wide Web is written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is nothing like its graphic translation. To take a look, web users can right-click on any empty space on a web page and a small pop-up menu will appear. They can choose View Source in Firefox ® or View Source in Microsoft Internet Explorer ® to see what the code looks like.
Web browsers read a website’s coding language (HTML) and display it in a graphical format.
The first successful charting browser, Mosaic, was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in 1992 and released in 1993. At the time, Prodigy, America Online (AOL), and Compuserv offered the only popular online charting services. These companies were closed networks that provided their own proprietary content, message boards, email programs, and interfaces, and did not provide access to the Internet.
The Mosaic browser opened up the Internet to the general public. It provided an easy way to browse the web and was free for personal use. To compete with the appeal of the Internet’s world wide web, closed networks had to introduce a pipeline to the Internet and provide a graphical browser to interpret HTML. By the time this happened, in the mid-1990s, Andreessen had teamed up with Jim Clark, the former founder of Silicon Graphics, to create a new core tool called Netscape.
Netscape remained the web browser of choice until Microsoft began pre-packaging its own version into the Windows® operating system. Internet Explorer® was generally considered inferior to Netscape in many respects, and was criticized in particular for continuing security problems, various bugs, and non-compliance with standard web protocols. While this has discouraged many in the online community, the flood of new computer users knew too little to be aware of or worry about. In 1998, Internet Explorer® dominated the market, largely due to Microsoft’s ability to preload it on new computer systems.
At the same time, Netscape, then known as Netscape Communicator, released its source code to the public. The browser underwent a major rewrite in the following years and emerged as the open source browser known as Mozilla by the Mozilla Organization, then owned by AOL. In 2003, AOL passed oversight to the newly created Mozilla Foundation, which renamed the browser Phoenix and then Firefox®.
Both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer® and Mozilla’s Firefox® are free to download and are two of the most popular options. In 2008, Google launched the Chrome™ browser, which quickly captured a significant share of the market. Many people who use Apple products have the Safari® browser, which was created by Apple for its operating systems; a version for Windows® is also available. Another alternative, Opera™, is also available. Many people choose to keep and use multiple browsers as some websites work better in one than another.
Many people choose to keep and use multiple browsers on their computers, as some websites work better in one than another.
