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.

[edit] Common Features

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.
Varying support of HTML 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 and user interface. Along with modularizing the code base, this also allows other applications to use a browsers rendering engine. For example, a word processor might use a browser's rendering engine to display a web preview version of a document.