Web browser
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A web browser is a client application which interacts with a web server, displaying requested web pages to a user. At a minimum, a web browser is a networked document viewer, but can also be a robust interactive end user interface to a web application.
Common Features [edit]
Of interest to software developers are some common features:
- Use of the stateless HTTP protocol for interacting with web servers. Many also support HTTPS / SSL for secure connections and FTP for browsing directories and downloading files.
- Varying support of HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS standards for rendering and formatting documents
- Some implement an extensible architecture (e.g. Firefox)
- Plugin support for additional document formats (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) and "rich" applications (e.g. Adobe Flash)
- Client-side programming with ECMAScript / JavaScript scripting engines
Most modern web browsers are implemented with a separate rendering engine, JavaScript interpreter and user interface. Along with modularizing the code base, this also allows other applications to use a browser's rendering engine. For example, a word processor might use a browser's rendering engine to display a web preview version of a document. It also allows multiple browsers to share common functionality. WebKit for example, is the rendering engine for Google Chrome, Konqueror, and Safari, but each have a distinct user interface and Chrome uses a different JavaScript runtime engine.
Web Browsers [edit]
There are a variety of web browsers commonly in use today:
- Firefox - Open source, multiple platforms
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer - Closed source, Microsoft Windows only
- Opera - Closed source, multiple platforms
- Safari - Closed source interface, open source rendering engine, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows
Trends [edit]
Web browser developers are continually improving the performance of their rendering and JavaScript engines. Many are also continually adding new HTML and JavaScript features. These trends make web browsers a stronger platform for complex web applications and multimedia. One limiting factor is lack of consistent support for many of these new features across all browsers. Web developers should watch and leverage these trends, with careful attention to not alienate any potential subset of users by making their web applications too dependent on any one web browser.
