Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Web Browser shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Web Browser offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Web Browser at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Web Browser? Wrong! If the Web Browser is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Web Browser then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Web Browser? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Web Browser and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Web Browser wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Web Browser then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Web Browser site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Web Browser, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Web Browser, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
)
A
web browser is a
application software that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a
website on the
World Wide Web or a local area network. Text and images on a Web page can contain
hyperlinks to other Web pages at the same or different website. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many websites by traversing these links. Web browsers format
HTML information for display, so the appearance of a Web page may differ between browsers.
Some of the Web browsers available for
personal computers include Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox,
Safari (web browser),
Opera (Internet suite), and
Netscape (web browser) in order of descending popularity (in August 2006). Browser Market Share for Calendar Q2, 2006.
Market Share by Net Applications.com. Web browsers are the most commonly used type of Hypertext Transfer Protocol user agent. Although browsers are typically used to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by Web servers in private networks or content in file systems.
Protocols and standards
{| class="wikitable" align="right" style="font-size: 85%; text-align: center; margin-left: 1em"|-! style="background-color:#BC8F8F;" |
Usage share of web browsers for September, 2007 Browser Market Share, September 2007, courtesy of Net Applications, a marketing company which obtains its data from the Alexa Internet
Alexa Toolbar or related products. Because people who install these products on their computers are not always aware that the product reports web browsing habits back to the marketers at Alexa some security software considers the Alexa Toolbar spyware and removes it. Both the automated removal-as-spyware and the self-selecting nature of those who install software that reports on personal web browsing habits raises questions as to whether the resulting data represents a biased sample
statistical sample of Internet users.]s primarily using
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hypertext 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, which is fully defined in Request for Comments 2616. HTTP/1.1 has its own required standards that Internet Explorer Criticisms of Internet Explorer#HTTP and MIME, but most other current-generation Web browsers do.
Pages are located by means of a
Uniform Resource Locator (uniform resource locator, RFC 1738), 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
gopher: for Gopher protocol#Gopher support in Web browsers (a hierarchical hyperlinking protocol),
ftp: for File Transfer Protocol (file transfer protocol),
rtsp: for Real Time Streaming Protocol (real-time streaming protocol), and
https: for HTTPS (an Transport Layer Security encrypted version of HTTP).
The
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 natively support a variety of formats in addition to HTML, such as the
JPEG,
PNG and
Graphics Interchange Format 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.
Early Web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary Web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern Web browsers support a combination of standards- and defacto-based HTML and XHTML, which should display in the same way across all browsers. No browser fully supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.x or CSS 2.1 yet. Currently many sites are designed using
WYSIWYG HTML generation programs such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. These often generate non-standard HTML by default, hindering the work of the World Wide Web Consortium in developing standards, specifically with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (cascading style sheets, used for page layout).
Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support
Usenet news, Internet Relay Chat (Internet relay chat), and e-mail. Protocols supported may include Network News Transfer Protocol (network news transfer protocol), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (simple mail transfer protocol),
Internet Message Access Protocol (Internet message access protocol), and Post Office Protocol (post office protocol). These browsers are often referred to as
Internet suites or
application suites rather than merely Web browsers.
History
One important person in the early design and evolution of the browser was Neil Larson who in 1977 created a TRS-80 program that displayed outlines a level at a time with hypertext jumps between levels. In 1984, expanding on ideas from futurist Ted Nelson, his commercial DOS Maxthink outline program added angle bracket hypertext jumps (adopted by later web browsers) to and from ASCII, batch, and other Maxthink files up to 32 levels deep. In 1986 he released his DOS Houdini network browser program that supported 2500 topics cross-connected with 7500 links in each file along with hypertext links among unlimited numbers of external ASCII, batch, and other Houdini files.
In 1987, these capabilites were included in his then popular shareware DOS file browser programs HyperRez (memory resident) and PC Hypertext (which also added jumps to programs, editors, graphic files containing hot spots jumps, and cross-linked theraurus/glossary files). These programs introduced many to the browser concept and 20 years later, Google still lists 3,000,000 references to PC Hypertext. In 1989, he created both HyperBBS and HyperLan which both allow multiple users to create/edit both topics and jumps for information and knowledge annealing which in concept, the columnist, John C.Dvorak says predated Wiki by many years.
From 1987 on, he also created TransText (hypertext word processor) and many utilities for rapidly building large scale knowledge systems ... and in 1989 helped produce for one of the big eight accounting firms a comprehensive knowledge system of integrating all accounting laws/regulations into a CDROM containing 50,000 files with 200,000 hypertext jumps. Additionally, the Lynx (a very early web-based browser) development history notes their project origin was based on the browser concepts from Neil Larson and Maxthink. In 1989, he declined joining the MOSAIC browser team with his preference for knowledge/wisdom creation over distributing information ... a problem still not solved by today's internet.
Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987. John Bottoms' short biography The browser, based on SGML tags, used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents. The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names. SGML-FAQ US Patent
Starting in 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez concept in creating Hytelnet which added jumps to telnet sites ... and which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world. The strength of Hytelnet was speed and simplicity in link creation/execution at the expense of a centralized world wide source for adding, indexing, and modifying telnet links. This problem was solved by the invention of the web server.
A NeXTcube was used by
Tim Berners-Lee (who pioneered the use of
hypertext for sharing information) as the world's first
Web server, and also an early Web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. Berners-Lee introduced it to colleagues at
CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of Web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the Web itself.
In April 1990, a draft patent application for a mass market consumer device for browsing pages via links "PageLink" was proposed by Craig Cockburn at Digital Equipment Co Ltd (DEC) whilst working in their Networking and Communications division in Reading, England. This application for a keyboardless touch screen browser for consumers also makes reference to "navigating and searching text" and "bookmarks" was aimed at (quotes paraphrased) "replacing books", "storing a shopping list" "have an updated personalised newspaper updated round the clock", "dynamically updated maps for use in a car" and suggests such a device could have a "profound effect on the advertising industry". The patent was canned by Digital as too futuristic and, being largely hardware based, had obstacles to market that purely software driven approaches did not suffer from.
In 1992, Tony Johnson releases the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allows viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handles compressed PostScript.
Another early popular Web browser was
ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard. However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by
Mosaic (web browser) which was a graphical browser running originally on
Unix but soon ported to the Apple Macintosh and
Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the killer application of the Internet.
Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as
Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship
Netscape Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.
Microsoft, which had thus far not marketed a browser (in fact even as late as 1995 Bill Gates dismissed personal use of the World Wide Web as a passing fad), finally entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product, purchased from
Spyglass, Inc. This began what is known as the
browser wars, the fight for the Web browser market between Microsoft and Netscape.
The wars put the Web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the Web could stymie standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation, leading to the acceptance of the Cascading Style Sheets proposed by Håkon Wium Lie over Netscape's JavaScript Style Sheets by
World Wide Web Consortium.
In 1996, Netscape's share of the browser market reached 86% (with Internet Explorer edging up 10%); but then Microsoft began integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with
Original equipment manufacturers;, and within two years the trend had reversed. Although Microsoft has since faced
antitrust litigation on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible.
In the second half of 2004 Internet Explorer had reached a peak market share of more than 92% Internet Explorer Market Share, 2004. Ever since then, its market share had been slowly but steadily declining to less than 79% (May 2007).
Unable to continue commercially funding the product's development, Netscape responded by
open source its product, creating Mozilla. This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet Explorer, but did nothing to slow Netscape's declining market share. The company was purchased by
America Online in late 1998. At first, the Mozilla project struggled to attract developers, but by 2002 it had evolved into a relatively stable and powerful
internet suite. Mozilla 1.0 was released to mark this milestone. Also in 2002, a spin off project that would eventually become the popular
Mozilla Firefox was released. In 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released; Firefox 1.5 was released in November 2005. Firefox 2, a major update, was released in October 2006 and work has already begun on Firefox 3 which is scheduled for release in 2007. In 2006, Mozilla and its derivatives account for approximately 12% of Web traffic.
Opera (Internet suite), an innovative, speedy browser popular in handheld devices, particularly mobile phones, as well as on PCs in some countries was released in 1996 and remains a niche player in the PC Web browser market. It is available on Nintendo's Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite and Wii consoles. The
Opera Mini browser uses the
Presto (layout engine) layout engine like all versions of Opera (Internet suite), but runs on most phones supporting Java Midlets.
The
Lynx (web browser) remains popular for
Unix shell users and with vision impaired users due to its entirely text-based nature. There are also several text-mode browsers with advanced features, such as
w3m, Links (web browser) (which can operate both in text and graphical mode), and the Links Fork (software) such as
ELinks.
Prior to the release of Mac OS X, Internet Explorer and Netscape were also the primary browsers in use on the Macintosh platform. However,
Apple Computer's Safari (web browser), the default browser on Mac OS X from version 10.3 onwards, has since grown to dominate this market. In August 2007, Apple also ported its Safari web browser for use on the Windows XP and Vista operating systems (note that the Windows versions of Safari are still in beta testing). Browsers such as Firefox and Camino are also popular amongst Mac users.
In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform, and that no more releases for the Macintosh would be made. However, in early 2005, Microsoft changed its plans, announcing that version 7 of Internet Explorer was under development. IE 7 was released for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista in October 2006.
Footnotes
See also
External links
- evolt.org - Browser Archive
- Comparison of free browsers
- Macintosh Web Browsers
- Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign
)
A
web browser is a
application software that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a
Web page at a
website on the
World Wide Web or a
local area network. Text and images on a Web page can contain hyperlinks to other Web pages at the same or different website. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many websites by traversing these links. Web browsers format HTML information for display, so the appearance of a Web page may differ between browsers.
Some of the Web browsers available for
personal computers include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari (web browser),
Opera (Internet suite), and Netscape (web browser) in order of descending popularity (in August 2006). Browser Market Share for Calendar Q2, 2006.
Market Share by Net Applications.com. Web browsers are the most commonly used type of
Hypertext Transfer Protocol user agent. Although browsers are typically used to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by
Web servers in private networks or content in file systems.
Protocols and standards
{| class="wikitable" align="right" style="font-size: 85%; text-align: center; margin-left: 1em"|-! style="background-color:#BC8F8F;" |
Usage share of web browsers for September, 2007 Browser Market Share, September 2007, courtesy of Net Applications, a marketing company which obtains its data from the
Alexa Internet Alexa Toolbar or related products. Because people who install these products on their computers are not always aware that the product reports web browsing habits back to the marketers at Alexa some security software considers the Alexa Toolbar spyware and removes it. Both the automated removal-as-spyware and the self-selecting nature of those who install software that reports on personal web browsing habits raises questions as to whether the resulting data represents a biased sample
statistical sample of Internet users.]s primarily using
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hypertext 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, which is fully defined in Request for Comments 2616. HTTP/1.1 has its own required standards that Internet Explorer
Criticisms of Internet Explorer#HTTP and MIME, but most other current-generation Web browsers do.
Pages are located by means of a Uniform Resource Locator (uniform resource locator, RFC 1738), 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
gopher: for
Gopher protocol#Gopher support in Web browsers (a hierarchical hyperlinking protocol),
ftp: for File Transfer Protocol (file transfer protocol),
rtsp: for Real Time Streaming Protocol (real-time streaming protocol), and
https: for HTTPS (an
Transport Layer Security encrypted version of HTTP).
The
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 natively support a variety of formats in addition to HTML, such as the
JPEG, PNG and
Graphics Interchange Format 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.
Early Web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary Web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern Web browsers support a combination of standards- and defacto-based HTML and
XHTML, which should display in the same way across all browsers. No browser fully supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.x or CSS 2.1 yet. Currently many sites are designed using WYSIWYG HTML generation programs such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. These often generate non-standard HTML by default, hindering the work of the
World Wide Web Consortium in developing standards, specifically with XHTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (cascading style sheets, used for page layout).
Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support
Usenet news, Internet Relay Chat (Internet relay chat), and
e-mail. Protocols supported may include
Network News Transfer Protocol (network news transfer protocol), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (simple mail transfer protocol), Internet Message Access Protocol (Internet message access protocol), and
Post Office Protocol (post office protocol). These browsers are often referred to as
Internet suites or
application suites rather than merely Web browsers.
History
One important person in the early design and evolution of the browser was Neil Larson who in 1977 created a TRS-80 program that displayed outlines a level at a time with hypertext jumps between levels. In 1984, expanding on ideas from futurist Ted Nelson, his commercial DOS Maxthink outline program added angle bracket hypertext jumps (adopted by later web browsers) to and from ASCII, batch, and other Maxthink files up to 32 levels deep. In 1986 he released his DOS Houdini network browser program that supported 2500 topics cross-connected with 7500 links in each file along with hypertext links among unlimited numbers of external ASCII, batch, and other Houdini files.
In 1987, these capabilites were included in his then popular shareware DOS file browser programs HyperRez (memory resident) and PC Hypertext (which also added jumps to programs, editors, graphic files containing hot spots jumps, and cross-linked theraurus/glossary files). These programs introduced many to the browser concept and 20 years later, Google still lists 3,000,000 references to PC Hypertext. In 1989, he created both HyperBBS and HyperLan which both allow multiple users to create/edit both topics and jumps for information and knowledge annealing which in concept, the columnist, John C.Dvorak says predated Wiki by many years.
From 1987 on, he also created TransText (hypertext word processor) and many utilities for rapidly building large scale knowledge systems ... and in 1989 helped produce for one of the big eight accounting firms a comprehensive knowledge system of integrating all accounting laws/regulations into a CDROM containing 50,000 files with 200,000 hypertext jumps. Additionally, the Lynx (a very early web-based browser) development history notes their project origin was based on the browser concepts from Neil Larson and Maxthink. In 1989, he declined joining the MOSAIC browser team with his preference for knowledge/wisdom creation over distributing information ... a problem still not solved by today's internet.
Another early browser, Silversmith, was created by John Bottoms in 1987. John Bottoms' short biography The browser, based on SGML tags, used a tag set from the Electronic Document Project of the AAP with minor modifications and was sold to a number of early adopters. At the time SGML was used exclusively for the formatting of printed documents. The use of SGML for electronically displayed documents signaled a shift in electronic publishing and was met with considerable resistance. Silversmith included an integrated indexer, full text searches, hypertext links between images text and sound using SGML tags and a return stack for use with hypertext links. It included features that are still not available in today's browsers. These include capabilities such as the ability to restrict searches within document structures, searches on indexed documents using wild cards and the ability to search on tag attribute values and attribute names. SGML-FAQ US Patent
Starting in 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez concept in creating Hytelnet which added jumps to telnet sites ... and which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world. The strength of Hytelnet was speed and simplicity in link creation/execution at the expense of a centralized world wide source for adding, indexing, and modifying telnet links. This problem was solved by the invention of the web server.
A NeXTcube was used by Tim Berners-Lee (who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information) as the world's first
Web server, and also an early Web browser, WorldWideWeb in 1990. Berners-Lee introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of Web browsers has been inseparably intertwined with the development of the Web itself.
In April 1990, a draft patent application for a mass market consumer device for browsing pages via links "PageLink" was proposed by Craig Cockburn at Digital Equipment Co Ltd (DEC) whilst working in their Networking and Communications division in Reading, England. This application for a keyboardless touch screen browser for consumers also makes reference to "navigating and searching text" and "bookmarks" was aimed at (quotes paraphrased) "replacing books", "storing a shopping list" "have an updated personalised newspaper updated round the clock", "dynamically updated maps for use in a car" and suggests such a device could have a "profound effect on the advertising industry". The patent was canned by Digital as too futuristic and, being largely hardware based, had obstacles to market that purely software driven approaches did not suffer from.
In 1992, Tony Johnson releases the MidasWWW browser. Based on Motif/X, MidasWWW allows viewing of PostScript files on the Web from Unix and VMS, and even handles compressed PostScript.
Another early popular Web browser was ViolaWWW, which was modeled after HyperCard. However, the explosion in popularity of the Web was triggered by Mosaic (web browser) which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix but soon ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993, and was dubbed the
killer application of the Internet.
Marc Andreessen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as
Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape released its flagship Netscape Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year.
Microsoft, which had thus far not marketed a browser (in fact even as late as 1995 Bill Gates dismissed personal use of the World Wide Web as a passing fad), finally entered the fray with its
Internet Explorer product, purchased from
Spyglass, Inc. This began what is known as the
browser wars, the fight for the Web browser market between Microsoft and Netscape.
The wars put the Web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the Web could stymie standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation, leading to the acceptance of the
Cascading Style Sheets proposed by Håkon Wium Lie over Netscape's
JavaScript Style Sheets by World Wide Web Consortium.
In 1996, Netscape's share of the browser market reached 86% (with Internet Explorer edging up 10%); but then Microsoft began integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with Original equipment manufacturers;, and within two years the trend had reversed. Although Microsoft has since faced antitrust litigation on these charges, the browser wars effectively ended once it was clear that Netscape's declining market share trend was irreversible.
In the second half of 2004 Internet Explorer had reached a peak market share of more than 92% Internet Explorer Market Share, 2004. Ever since then, its market share had been slowly but steadily declining to less than 79% (May 2007).
Unable to continue commercially funding the product's development, Netscape responded by open source its product, creating Mozilla. This helped the browser maintain its technical edge over Internet Explorer, but did nothing to slow Netscape's declining market share. The company was purchased by America Online in late 1998. At first, the Mozilla project struggled to attract developers, but by 2002 it had evolved into a relatively stable and powerful
internet suite. Mozilla 1.0 was released to mark this milestone. Also in 2002, a spin off project that would eventually become the popular
Mozilla Firefox was released. In 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released; Firefox 1.5 was released in November 2005. Firefox 2, a major update, was released in October 2006 and work has already begun on Firefox 3 which is scheduled for release in 2007. In 2006, Mozilla and its derivatives account for approximately 12% of Web traffic.
Opera (Internet suite), an innovative, speedy browser popular in handheld devices, particularly mobile phones, as well as on PCs in some countries was released in 1996 and remains a niche player in the PC Web browser market. It is available on Nintendo's
Nintendo DS,
Nintendo DS Lite and
Wii consoles. The Opera Mini browser uses the Presto (layout engine) layout engine like all versions of
Opera (Internet suite), but runs on most phones supporting Java Midlets.
The
Lynx (web browser) remains popular for Unix shell users and with vision impaired users due to its entirely text-based nature. There are also several text-mode browsers with advanced features, such as w3m,
Links (web browser) (which can operate both in text and graphical mode), and the Links
Fork (software) such as
ELinks.
Prior to the release of
Mac OS X, Internet Explorer and Netscape were also the primary browsers in use on the Macintosh platform. However, Apple Computer's Safari (web browser), the default browser on Mac OS X from version 10.3 onwards, has since grown to dominate this market. In August 2007, Apple also ported its Safari web browser for use on the Windows XP and Vista operating systems (note that the Windows versions of Safari are still in beta testing). Browsers such as Firefox and
Camino are also popular amongst Mac users.
In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform, and that no more releases for the Macintosh would be made. However, in early 2005, Microsoft changed its plans, announcing that version 7 of Internet Explorer was under development. IE 7 was released for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista in October 2006.
Footnotes
See also
External links
- evolt.org - Browser Archive
- Comparison of free browsers
- Macintosh Web Browsers
- Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign
web browser from FOLDOC
web browser < World-Wide Web > A browser for the World-Wide Web. (1996-03-23) Try this search on Wikipedia, OneLook, Google
Web Browser Recommendations for Using eBay
Search the Help pages (Does not search for items or products)
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