A web browser translates the coding language of the internet into graphic form for easy navigation. The first successful graphical browser was Mosaic, followed by Netscape and Internet Explorer. Mozilla emerged as an open source browser, later renamed Firefox. Other popular options include Chrome, Safari, and Opera.
A web browser is a software program that interprets the coding language of the World Wide Web in graphic form, displaying the translation rather than the encoding. This allows anyone to “surf the web” with simple point-and-click navigation, bypassing the need to know the commands used in software languages.
The World Wide Web is written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which looks nothing like its graphical translation. To take a look, web users can right-click any empty space on a web page and a small pop-up menu will appear. They can choose View Page Source in Firefox® or View Source in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer® to see what the code looks like.
The first successful graphical web browser, Mosaic, was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in 1992 and released in 1993. At the time, the only popular online graphics services were offered by Prodigy, America Online (AOL), and Compuserv. These companies were closed networks that provided their own proprietary content, message boards, email programs, and interfaces, and did not provide Internet access.
The Mosaic browser opened up the internet to the general public. It provided an easy way to browse the web and was free for personal use. To compete with the worldwide network appeal of the Internet, closed networks had to introduce a pipeline to the Internet and provide a graphical browser to interpret HTML. When this happened in the mid-1990s, Andreessen had teamed up with Jim Clark, former founder of Silicon Graphics, to create a new flagship tool called Netscape.
Netscape remained the Web browser of choice until Microsoft began prepackaging its version in the Windows® operating system. Internet Explorer® has generally been considered inferior to Netscape in many ways, and has been particularly criticized for ongoing security issues, numerous bugs, and a lack of compliance with Web standard protocols. While this has put off many in the online community, the wave of new computer users knew too little to be aware of or concerned. In 1998, Internet Explorer® dominated the market, largely due to Microsoft’s ability to pre-load it into new computer systems.
At the same time, Netscape, then known as Netscape Communicator, released its source code to the public. The browser underwent a massive rewrite over the next few years and emerged as the open source web browser known as Mozilla, under the Mozilla Organization, then owned by AOL. In 2003, AOL handed oversight to the newly formed Mozilla Foundation, which renamed the browser Phoenix and later Firefox®.
Both Internet Explorer® from Microsoft and Firefox® from Mozilla are free to download and are two of the most popular options. In 2008, Google released the Chrome browser, which quickly captured a significant portion of the market. Many people who use Apple products have the Safari® browser, created by Apple for its operating systems; a version for Windows® is also available. Another alternative, Opera, is also available. Many people choose to maintain and use multiple browsers, as some sites perform better in one than the other.
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