2. Introduction
• A web 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) and
may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of
content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users
to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.
• Although browsers are primarily intended to access
the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access
information provided by Web servers in private
networks or files in file systems. Some browsers can be
also used to save information resources to file systems.
3. • There are different web browsers that are
available and in use today and they all come
with a variety of features. Some of the available
web browsers include Amaya, AOL
Explorer, Arlington
Kiosk, Dillo, Elinks, Epiphany, Flock, Galeon, iCab
, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer for Mac, K-
Meleon, KioWare, Konqueror, Links, Lynx, Maxth
on, Mosaic, Mozilla, Mozilla
Firefox, Netscape, OmniWeb, SeaMonkey, Safari
, Opera and Off By One. Most of these web
browsers are free, but there are five of them
that do have a purchase price.
4. • WorldWideWeb was the first web browser. When it was
written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.
• The source code was released into the public domain in
1993. Some of the code still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's
NeXTcube in the CERN museum and has not been
recovered due to the computer's status as a historical
artifact.
• It was capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading
and opening any file type supported by the NeXT
system, browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. At
first, images were displayed in separate windows, until
NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects.
WorldWideWeb
5. Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web
browser descended from the Mozilla Application
Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. As of
June 2010. Firefox was the second most widely
used browser, with 23.81% of worldwide usage
share of web browsers.
• To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko
layout engine, which implements most current
web standards in addition to several features
which are intended to anticipate likely additions
to the standards.
6. • Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World
Wide Web. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability,
Windows port & simple installation all contributed to making it
the application that opened up the Web to the general public.
Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with
text instead of displaying images in a separate window.
• Mosaic was developed at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications(NCSA) at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the
browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and
support on January 7, 1997. However, it can still be downloaded
from NCSA.
Mosiac
7. Netscape Navigator
• Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for
the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s.
• It was the flagship product of the Netscape
Communications Corporation and the dominant web
browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its
usage had almost disappeared.
• This was partly due to the increased usage of
Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser software
and other web browsers, and partly because the
Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not
sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after
the late 1990s.
8. Windows Internet Explorer
• Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet
Explorer), is a series of graphical web browsers developed by
Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows
line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the
most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak
of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and
IE6.
• That percentage share has since declined in the face of
renewed competition from other web browsers. Its usage
share now sits at approximately 50% to 60% and is slowly
trending downward. Microsoft spent over $100 million a
year on IE in the late 1990s, with over 1,000 people working
on it by 1999.
9. • Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera
Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such
as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages,
managing contacts, chatting on IRC downloading files via BitTorrent,
and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal
computers and mobile phones.
• Features include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures,
and an integrated download manager. Its security features include
built-in phishing and malware protection, strong encryption when
browsing secure websites, and the ability to easily delete private
data such as HTTP cookies.
• Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems,
including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. The
Desktop Team recently dropped support for Solaris.
Opera
10. Safari is a graphical web browser developed by Apple
and included as part of the Mac OS X operating system.
First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003. on the
company's Mac OS X operating system, it became
Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3
"Panther”. A version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows
operating system, first released on June 11, 2007,
supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows
7.The latest stable release of the browser is 5.0, which is
available as a free download for both Mac OS X and
Microsoft Windows. As of 2010, Safari is the fourth most
widely used browser, following Google Chrome.
Safari
11. Google Chrome
• Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses
the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first
released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September
2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008.
The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or
"chrome", of web browsers. As of June 2010, Chrome was the
third most widely used browser, with 7.24% of worldwide usage
share of web browsers, according to Net Applications.
•Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but
lacks built in automatic updates and Google branding, and most
notably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored
Google logo.
12. Although there are many web browsers
available and many more are likely to arrive in
future, only those which are exciting and user
friendly will be able to survive market
competition and hold on to a substantial
market share.