Web Browsers have come a long way from the days of the first internet web browser, Mosaic and the like. The monopoly of the Microsoft-authored Internet Explorer has been decisively broken and terminated possibly, forever. Web browsers today have progressed from being a mere internet-exploring tool to being a multi-purpose, multi-pronged application that brings several advantages to the web visitor. A web browser is defined as a software application, a typical HTTP client that helps the internet visitor to interpret the HTML documents and display the content from web servers or in file systems.Today there are a variety of internet browsers available. The prominent browsers available for personal computers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox Opera Netscape and so on. A browser is the most commonly used kind of user agent. The largest networked collection of linked documents is known as the World Wide Web.
Web browsers communicate with web servers primarily using HTTP (hyper-text transfer protocol) to fetch webpages. HTTP allows web browsers to submit information to web servers as well as fetch web pages from them. The most commonly used HTTP is HTTP/1.1. Web Pages are located by means of a URL (uniform resource locator), which is treated as an address, beginning with http: for HTTP access. Many browsers also support a variety of other URL types and their corresponding protocols, such as ftp: for FTP (file transfer protocol), gopher: for Gopher, and https: for HTTPS (an SSL encrypted version of HTTP).
The generally accepted file format for a web page is usually HTML (hyper-text markup language) and is identified in the HTTP protocol using a MIME content type. Most browsers certainly support other technology formats in addition to HTML, such as the JPEG PNG and GIF image formats, and can be extended to support more through the use of plugins. The combination of HTTP content type and URL protocol specification allows web page designers to embed images, animations, video, sound, and streaming media into a web page, or to make them accessible through the web page.
In the beginning web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of web browsers led to the development of HTML into a more complex avatars. Modern web browsers support standards-based HTML and XHTML which should display in the same way across all browsers. Web sites today are designed using WYSIWYG HTML generation programs such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage. There are continuous development activities in developing standards, specifically with XHTML and CSS (cascading style sheets, used for page layout). Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support Usenet news, IRC (Internet relay chat), and e-mail. Protocols supported may include NNTP (network news transfer protocol), SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), IMAP (Internet message access protocol), and POP (post office protocol).
Different browsers have uniqueness built in because of the very features that they provide and very functions that they support. Modern browsers and web pages tend to utilize many features and techniques that did not exist in the early days of the web. The following is a list of some of the most notable features:
- HTTP and HTTPS
- HTML, XMLand XHTML
- GIF, PNGJPEG and SVG
- Cascading Style Sheets
- JavaScript
- Digital certificates
- RSS
- Bookmarks
- Caching
- Plugins like Macromedia Flash and Quick Time.
Other features generally include:
- Autocomplete
- Tabbed browsing
- Spatial navigation
- Caret navigation
- Screen reader
- Pop-up Blocker
- Ad filtering
- Phishing
Web Browsers have today established themselves as a most user-friendly and essential technology tool for surfing the internet. Web browsers help the visitors to the ethereal world of the web to view contents from different file formats, interact with other websites, incorporate appropriate technology to view/download/upload multi-media content and streaming multi-media. Web browsers today provide functionalities like blocking of unwanted pop-up advertisements, spywares and phishing attempts. They provide the convenience of tabbed browsing and come with advanced features like auto-fill and password and download managers.
Web browsers of today are not mere messengers between client and server. They are full-fledged programs capable of using fuzzy logic to select most appropriate content and help the web visitor to browse safely and pleasurably.
Watch the video related to types of browsers
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Help answer the question about types of browsers
why is the coding for web design so technical when it comes to different browser types?im coding a website, and i can never seem to get it right for all the browswers (internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, mozilla firefox etc). i code it and it looks great in ie6, but then i go to ie7 and it looks like crap. or something cool works in mozilla but then doesnt work in ie6 or 7. can someone please help me out?
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PKP Iyer, Editor, Excellone Technologies ( http://www.excellone.com ) and Java Development India ( http://www.javadevelopmentindia.com ). Our company offer Technology solutions using Java such as SPRING, J2EE, J2ME for Software Application Development and IT Outsourcing services from our offshore software development centre in India.
May 25th, 2009 on 2:58 am
FireFox is the best
May 25th, 2009 on 3:01 am
let me just say, i feel your pain, as do millions of other people out there…
coding a site that will look good on all the different browsers is tricky business. as you mentioned, different versions of IE will display things differently from each other, and differently than FF. it really depends on what you're trying to put on the site. IE and FF render styles from CSS differently, unfortunately. however, you can do conditional styles…which ease your pain a little bit.
if you make a style sheet for each browser, one for IE, one for FF, you can by default load the stylesheet that works well with FF, but you can override it with something like this:
<!–[if IE]>
load your style sheet
<![endif]–>
can you post anything specific you're trying to put on the site?
May 25th, 2009 on 3:44 am
the shit firefox
May 25th, 2009 on 3:48 am
firefox hands down!
May 25th, 2009 on 3:59 am
Use the Import/Export features.
May 25th, 2009 on 10:11 am
Google chrome
May 26th, 2009 on 1:12 am
Firefox took about 200,000 meg of ram from my pc
May 26th, 2009 on 3:57 am
opera
May 26th, 2009 on 6:24 am
Safari owns
May 26th, 2009 on 7:16 am
google chrome (statisticly the fastest, but no security)
Mozilla Firefox (the best and also very fast)
Internet Explorer ( the worst)
Opera (decent but not great)
Apple Safari ( very fast, not very popular except with MAC users)
There are a few other ones too but are not even worth mentioning
May 26th, 2009 on 11:15 am
I assume you mean without registry editing
Open IE, Tools, Internet Options, Programs Tab, Click "Make Default"
May 26th, 2009 on 12:58 pm
Unfortunately, no. That is, not without jailbreaking your phone first. The iPhone's "security features" give applications limited freedom to save to the file system and give you limited freedom to access files saved, and therefore Safari doesn't support it.
May 26th, 2009 on 8:28 pm
When you make a request to a Web browser, it responds with a file.
At the very beginning of its response is a header. The header is a few lines of text that tells the Web browser all sorts of things about the file being sent back. Among the things sent back is the content type.
Content-type tells the browser what the Web server thinks the file is. The browser uses the content-type response to determine how it will handle the file: Try to display it, ask another program to open it, prompt you to save it to your disk drive, etc.
What the content-type line sent by a server contains depends on how the server is set up. Most Web servers have a "default" content-type list; what is sent is usually dependent on the file name / extension, but not always. Also, the Web server's admin can change what content-types are sent for specific file types.
You can also forge content-type information from a programming standpoint. It is very common, for example, for Web programmers to "dynamically" create data files (such as comma-delimited files), or even images, on the server, and then feed a person's Web browser a content-type specific to that file, overriding what the Web server would have sent.
A previous answerer stated the server sends a MIME type. That's not correct.
MIME is a methodology for e-mail programs to handle attachments. Both MIME and HTTP 1.1 have Content-type attributes, and they use the same format. They are very closely interrelated, but not the same thing.
May 27th, 2009 on 1:42 am
This is a HUGE subject, far too big to deal with here. The first thing that you should do, if you are serious about making your web site as accessible as possible, is to download the major browsers so that you can check your design in each one. So you want IE (unfortunately, you can't have IE 6 & 7 on the same computer!), Firefox, Netscape and perhaps Opera. If you can get it right in these, you will satisfy the vast majority of people.
The secret to compatibility is to make your pages compliant with the standards laid down by the w3c. The majority of browsers work to those standards. In the past, it was necessary to include a number of "tweaks" on the page to allow for the peculiarities of some browsers (particularly earlier versions of IE) but this is becoming less the case.
As well as checking your pages yourself, there is a validator available for your HTML through the w3 web site – first link below.
The second link takes you to a series of tutorials which I'm sure you will find helpful.
Incidentally, it's not just browsers that you have to satisfy. Users have a wide range of screen resolution and, unless you are careful, you may find that a page which looks perfect on one PC will break up on a smaller screen.
Really, it's a minefield – good luck!
May 27th, 2009 on 3:30 am
May 28th, 2009 on 8:11 am
i use lunascape
May 28th, 2009 on 11:26 am
browsershots as said above is ok, but has limitations.
Personally, I have the latest issues of IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari. These cover 99.5% of ww users: enough for me…
I test my sites on each of them, at different resolutions.
May 28th, 2009 on 2:19 pm
i use firefox