Web Browser History

Dozens of innovative web browsers have been created by various people and teams over the years.

The first widely used web browser was NCSA Mosaic. The Mosaic programming team then created the first commercial web browser called Netscape Navigator, later renamed Communicator, then renamed back to just Netscape. The Netscape browser led in user share until Microsoft Internet Explorer took the lead in 1999 due to its distribution advantage. A free open source software  version of Netscape was then developed called Mozilla, which was the internal name for the old Netscape browser, and released in 2002. Mozilla has since gained in market share, particularly on non-Windows platforms, largely due to its open source foundation, and in 2004 was released in the quickly popular FireFox version.

A chronological listing of some of the influential early web browsers that advanced the state of the art is provided below:

• WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.

• libwww. Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch.

• Line-mode. Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.

• Erwise. After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master's project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn't developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.

• ViolaWWW. Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.

• Midas. During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLACdeveloped a third browser for Unix systems, called Midas, to help distribute information to colleagues about his physics research.

• Samba. Robert Cailliau started development of the first web browser for the Macintosh, called Samba. Development was picked up by Nicola Pellow, and the browser was functional by the end of 1992.

• Mosaic. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.

• Arena. In 1993, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England, developed a browser called Arena, with powerful features for positioning tables and graphics.

• Lynx. The University of Kansas had written a hypertext browser independently of the web, called Lynx, used to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0 in March, 1993. Lynx quickly became the preferred web browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in use today. Resources include the Browser.org Lynx  page, the ISC Lynx  page, and the Lynx User Guide .

• Cello . Tom Bruce, cofounder of the Legal Information Institute , realized that most lawyers used Microsoft PC's, and so he developed a web browser for that platform called Cello, finished in the summer of 1993.

• Opera. In 1994, the Opera browser was developed by a team of researchers at a telecommunication company called Telenor in Oslo, Norway. The following year, two members of the team -- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy -- left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially. Opera 2.1 was first made available on the Internet in the summer of 1996.

• Internet in a box. In January, 1994, O'Reilly and Associates announced a product called Internet In A Box which collected all of the software needed to access the web together, so that you only had to install one application, instead of downloading and installing several programs. While not a unique browser in its own right, this product was a breakthrough because it distributed other browsers and made the web a lot more accessible to the home user.

• Navipress. In February, 1994, Navisoft released a browser for the PC and Macintosh called Navipress. This was the first browser since Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser that incorporated an editor, so that you could browse and edit content at the same time. Navipress later became AOLPress , and is still available in some download locations on the Internet but has not been maintained since 1997.

• Mozilla. In October, 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the Internet. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, making it the first commercial web browser. An open source version of the Netscape browser was released in 2002 was also named Mozilla in tribute to this early version, and then released as the quickly popular FireFox in November, 2004.
•  Internet Explorer. On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system, including a Web browser called Internet Explorer. By the fall of 1996, Explorer had a third of market share, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999.

What is a browser?

Web browser, a software application used to locate, retrieve and also display content on the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images, video and other files. As a client/server model, the browser is the client run on a computer that contacts the Web server and requests information. The Web server sends the information back to the Web browser which displays the results on the computer or other Internet-enabled device that supports a browser.

Today's browsers are fully-functional software suites that can interpret and display HTML Web pages, applications, JavaScript, AJAX and other content hosted on Web servers. Many browsers offer plug-ins which extend the capabilities of a browser so it can display multimedia information (including sound and video), or the browser can be used to perform tasks such as videoconferencing, to design web pages or add anti-phishing filters and other security features to the browser.

Some Basic Parts of Web Browser

We all know what a Web browser looks like, but it's good to have a complete breakdown of the various parts of most Web browsers just for reference's sake. The parts of a browser include:

• Status bar: This is the box at the bottom of your browser window. The status bar displays all sorts of information, depending on what you're doing at the time, but mostly it's for showing load speed and the URL of whatever address your mouse is hovering over.
• Address bar:This is the box at the top of your browser window that displays the entire URL, or Web site address.
• Title bar: The title bar is at the very top of your browser window; in both Firefox and Internet Explorer it is the blue bar there at the top. You'll see the title of the Web page there; for example, you should see "What Is A Web Browser?" at the top of your browser window right now.
• Toolbar Icons: The toolbar and its icons are at the top of your browser window right underneath the Title Bar. This is where you'll see the Back button, the Home button, the Refresh button, etc.
• Display Window: The Display Window is just a fancy term for your browser work space; it's the frame through which you see this website right now.
• Scroll Bars: If you've ever been to a website that you had to "scroll down" to read something, then you've used the scroll bars. They're just navigational/directional aids.

There's more if you REALLY want to get into the nuts and bolts of a Web browser, but these parts are the basic ones that anyone should be concerned about. And of course, not all browsers are created equal - so some of the above definitions might not be appropriate.

The Most Popular Web Browsers

Here are just a few of Web browsers available to you for a free download:

• Microsoft's Internet Explorer : Most Internet users are using Internet Explorer because it's easy to use and most Web sites are written with Internet Explorer in mind, meaning that they are compatible.
• Opera : Opera is another popular browser that's easy to use; however, it can have some compatibility issues with various websites.
• Mozilla's Firefox : Firefox is rapidly gaining ground right behind Internet Explorer because of its tabbed browsing, superior security features, and fast load.
• Mac Safari : Specifically for Mac users, Safari is an excellent choice for a Web browser, with fast load and good compatibility with most websites out there.

The History of the Internet

Many people think that the Internet is a recent innovation, when in fact the essence of it has been around for over a quarter century. The Internet began as ARPAnet, a U.S. Department of Defense project to create a nationwide computer network that would continue to function even if a large portion of it were destroyed in a nuclear war or natural disaster.

During the next two decades, the network that evolved was used primarily by academic institutions, scientists and the government for research and communications. The appeal of the Internet to these bodies was obvious, as it allowed disparate institutions to connect to each others' computing systems and databases, as well as share data via E-mail.

The nature of the Internet changed abruptly in 1992, when the U.S. government began pulling out of network management, and commercial entities offered Internet access to the general public for the first time. This change in focus marked the beginning of the Internet's astonishing expansion.
According to a survey conducted by CommerceNet and Nielsen Media Research in early 1997, nearly one out of every four Americans over the age of 16 is an Internet user. And the number of users worldwide is believed to be well into the tens of millions. Other statistics are equally startling:

• A CNN report stated that Internet traffic in 1996 was 25 times what it was just two years earlier.
• The market research group IntelliQuest pegged the number of Internet users in the U.S. in late 1996 at 47 million - a 34 percent increase over the first quarter of that year.
• According to IBM, 146 countries currently have at least some level of Internet access.
• The technology research firm IDG estimates that by century's end, one billion people worldwide will have access to personal computers—more than doubling the computer-savvy population of 1996. 
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The Internet explosion coincides with the advent of increasingly powerful yet reasonably priced personal computers with easy-to-use graphical operating systems. The result has been an attraction of recent computer "converts" to the network, and new possibilities for exploiting a wealth of multimedia capabilities.

For further details on the Internet's history, go to http://www.internetvalley.com/intval.html

How Does the Internet Work?

How does the Internet work? Good question! The Internet's growth has become explosive and it seems impossible to escape the bombardment of www.com's seen constantly on television, heard on radio, and seen in magazines. Because the Internet has become such a large part of our lives, a good understanding is needed to use this new tool most effectively.

Because the Internet is a global network of computers each computer connected to the Internet must have a unique address. Internet addresses are in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn where nnn must be a number from 0 - 255. This address is known as an IP address. (IP stands for Internet Protocol; more on this later.) The picture below illustrates two computers connected to the Internet; your computer with IP address 1.2.3.4 and another computer with IP address 5.6.7.8. The Internet is represented as an abstract object in-between. 

                                               






The Internet is a worldwide collection of computer networks, cooperating with each other to exchange data using a common software standard. Through telephone wires and satellite links, Internet users can share information in a variety of forms. The size, scope and design of the Internet allows users to:

• connect easily through ordinary personal computers and local phone numbers;
• exchange electronic mail (E-mail) with friends and colleagues with accounts on the Internet;
• post information for others to access, and update it frequently;
• access multimedia information that includes sound, photographic images and even video; and
• access diverse perspectives from around the world.

An additional attribute of the Internet is that it lacks a central authority—in other words, there is no "Internet, Inc." that controls the Internet. Beyond the various governing boards that work to establish policies and standards, the Internet is bound by few rules and answers to no single organization.

What is Internet..?

When the computing era took a major leap in the 80s, it was all just about the operating systems and the programming languages. People were getting gaga over the heavy technology revolution thinking that this is the one thing that the world needed to get over the bounds of time and space, and as usual, they were wrong. It was not long after the computer revolution that a tide, a blizzard of communication, arrived. This technology now makes the computers look lifeless if they don’t have it. Connecting the corners of the cobwebbed world even from its remotest corner is the 'Internet'

Internet

The internet in simple terms is a network of the interlinked computer networking worldwide, which is accessible to the general public. These interconnected computers work by transmitting data through a special type of packet switching which is known as the IP or the internet protocol.

Internet is such a huge network of several different interlinked networks relating to the business, government, academic, and even smaller domestic networks, therefore internet is known as the network of all the other networks. These networks enable the internet to be used for various important functions which include the several means of communications like the file transfer, the online chat and even the sharing of the documents and web sites on the WWW, or the World Wide Web.

It is always mistaken said that the internet and the World Wide Web are both the same terms, or are synonymous. Actually there is a very significant difference between the two which has to be clear to understand both the terms. The internet and World Wide Web are both the networks yet; the internet is the network of the several different computers which are connected through the linkage of the accessories like the copper wires, the fiber optics and even the latest wireless connections. However, the World Wide Web consists of the interlinked collection of the information and documents which are taken as the resource by the general public. These are then linked by the website URLs and the hyperlinks. Therefore World Wide Web is one of the services offered by the whole complicated and huge network of the internet.

The use of IP in the Internet is the integral part of the network, as they provide the services of the internet, through different layers organization through the IP data packets. There are other protocols that are the sub-classes of the IP itself, like the TCP, and the HTTP.