| A
software program that lets you see and hear what's
on the web. Examples include Netscape and Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
A browser is
an application program that provides a way to look
at and interact with all the information on the
World Wide Web. The word "browser" seems
to have originated prior to the Web as a generic
term for user interfaces that let you browse
(navigate through and read) text files online. By
the time the first Web browser with a graphical user
interface was generally available (Mosaic, in 1993),
the term seemed to apply to Web content, too.
Technically, a Web browser is a client program that
uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make
requests of Web servers throughout the Internet on
behalf of the browser user. A commercial version of
the original browser, Mosaic, is in use. Many of the
user interface features in Mosaic, however, went
into the first widely-used browser, Netscape
Navigator. Microsoft followed with its Microsoft
Internet Explorer. Today, these two browsers are the
only two browsers that the vast majority of Internet
users are aware of. Although the online services,
such as America Online, originally had their own
browsers, virtually all now offer the Netscape or
Microsoft browser. Lynx is a text-only browser for
UNIX shell and VMS users. Another recently offered
and well-regarded browser is Opera.
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