Barb Piccininni – Week 7 – Task 3.3
Web browsers are very common in our everyday lives; from programs on our computers, cell phones or tablets we depend on web browser to load our web pages quickly. “A web browser is different from windows or Mac which are systems that let you manage files and programs. A Search engine is a website that is used to search the internet. Instead a web browser is a program on your computer that allows you to visit websites.” [1]
There are many web browsers that we can use to search the internet: Internet explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Apple Safari, Mozilla, Opera and Google Chrome. As stated on Wikipedia Internet Explorer is the most used web browser today, although most of the information collected is only estimated [3]. According to a graph by StatCounter since 2008 Internet Explorer has dropped in percentage of use vs. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Mobile. Mobile has gone up in percentage from 0 in July of 2008 to 7.12% in August of 2011.
Every page runs through web browser. Many years ago web browsers took a long time to load but they have become faster over the years and you can even use stopwatch to time how fast your web page loads. WorldWideWeb was the first web browser, released to the public in 1993. For history of the web browser we can go back to 1945, “Vannevar Bush writes and article in Atlantic Monthly about photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, from memory extension, which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche” to March of 1995 when “CERN held a two day seminar to show WWW demonstrated to reporters how to ‘surf the web’” [2]
Security is a large portion of a web browser and how a user might choose one from the other. Such as the IE9’s SmartScreen that does not let you view a page or attachment if it does not pass it’s security settings. Apple Safari “also installs a service called Bonjour, this service has been involved in at least three know exploits”. [4] Bonjour can be disabled so to keep security at a higher level. Security plays a huge roll in today’s society and consequently companies have to constantly update to better security for users.
1) What Browser - http://www.whatbrowser.org
2) W3 - http://www.w3.org/History.html