We all use web browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge every day, but do we understand what they are?
Let's find out, what made the web browsers, one of the most used software application in today's world.
A Web Browser is nothing but a software application, which is used to access the information available on the internet. When a user like you and me requests some information, the web browser fetches the data from a web server and then displays the response on your desktop or mobile device. The information is transferred using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which defines how text, images and video are transmitted on the web.
Every webpage, image and video available on the internet, has its own unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL). You've already learned about URL in the previous video. It's like a street address that tells your browser where to go on the Internet.
When you type a URL into the browser's address bar and press Enter on your keyboard, the browser will load the page associated with that URL.
It uses a piece of software called a rendering engine to translate that data into text and images. This data is written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and web browsers read this code to create what we see, hear and experience on the internet.
The first web browser, WorldWideWeb was created in the year of 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee. Though, it was completely different from the World Wide Web we use today.
In 1993, a new browser Mosaic was revealed by Mark Andressen and their team. It was the first browser to display text and images at a time on the device screen. Later in 1994, he also created another browser called, Netscape.
Microsoft launched their Internet Explorer in 1995, and soon it became the most popular web browser.
In later years, modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari came to market.
Websites save information about you in certain files called cookies. Cookie gets saved on your computer for the next time you visit that site. Upon your return, the website code will read that cookie to see that it’s you.
For example, when you go to a website, the page remembers your username and password – that’s made possible by a cookie. Some cookies are used to remember our interests, our browsing patterns, etc. Websites show us ads based on our interests, using cookies.
Browsers also does other things like, it keeps your personal information secure and check sites for viruses. It also keeps tracks of sites you've visited and keeps relevant information in its cache. So the next time you request those same websites, they will load up faster because there's less data to download and update the cached version.
That's it for this lesson, see you in the next one.