Web Browsers

A web browser is a program that lets a human access webpages on the World Wide Web. At a bare minimum, a web browser must be able to make HTTP requests and to present parsed HTML to the user in the form that he can understand. While most people interact with their browser with a mouse, many advanced web browsers such as Opera provide full keyboard and voice control. Also, there are specialty browsers designed for people with physical handicaps and other disabilities. For use in a low-resources environment, text-only web browsers are used.
In addition to the text and pictures of standards-compliant HTML code, most of today’s web browsers can display video, play music, and provide a limited amount of scripting ability. While these abilities do afford the webmaster the ability to design more elaborate websites, not all web browsers interpret the non-standard code in the same way. In fact, even the standardized code is not very well supported certain web browsers, notably Internet Explorer. The race to add more features at the expense of standards-compliance is known as the Browser Wars, and has led to a situation where very few websites display properly in all the major web browsers. From 2002 until late 2006 the Browser Wars have been very cool with little development done on IE, the most popular web browser in use today. However, in late October 2006 both IE and Firefox (IE’s current arch-foe) released new versions of the software.
The first web browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee, who also invented HTML, HTTP, and wrote the first web server.