Browsers 2
- 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.