What is a browser?

This article will give some definitions for browsers

Definitions for browser

• Browser is an application, which helps us to view the Web sites and the web content.


• Web sites are located in some remote systems, which needs a special kind of program or an application to access them, such an application is called browser.


• A browser is an application which you can use to retrieve web pages from web sites and view.


• When you type a URL in the browser, the browser will convert it into a web request which web server can understand. Browser will send the request to web server using the HTTP protocol.


• When a web server returns a web page as a Response, the browser will understand the response and display the body of the response to the user in browser.


• In simple terms a browser can be defined as “A software application used to locate and display Web pages”


• You can create your own simple browser application using C++, C#, VB.NET or any other language you like. All you need to know is, how to compose a request which web server can understand, how to parse and display the response from web server and communicate with webserver using HTTP protocol.


• Even though the basic job of browser is just send requests to web server and receive response from the server, modern browser provide several other enhanced features including Back/Forward buttons, save viewed files to disk so that they can be viewed later, cache images so that the same images need not be downloaded again and again etc.


• Internet Explorer, Netspace, Mozilla are some of the popular web browsers currently available in the market.


• Netscape was the most popular web browser till 4-5 years back, but currently more than 90% of the internet users use "Internet Explorer" to browse the websites.