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Protocols and standards
Communication between the web server and the browser uses primarily the HTTP protocol. Most browsers also support other protocols, such as FTP, Gopher, and HTTPS (a SSL encrypted version of HTTP). Web browsers are able to retrieve documents stored in other file formats or in streams using these other protocols, but also using HTTP. This allows the author to embed images, animations, video and sound into a web page, or to make them accessible through the web page.
Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern web browsers (such as Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) support standards-based HTML and XHTML (starting with HTML 4.01), which should display in the same way across all browsers.
Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support Usenet news and e-mail via the NNTP, IMAP and POP protocols.
Brief history
Tim Berners-Lee, who pioneered the use of hypertext for sharing information, created the first web browser, named WorldWideWeb, in 1990 and introduced it to colleagues at CERN in March 1991. Since then the development of web browsers as been inseparably intertwined with the development of the web itself.
The explosion in popularity of the web was triggered by NCSA Mosaic which was a graphical browser running originally on Unix but soon ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1.0 was released in September 1993. Marc Andreesen, who was the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, quit to form a company that would later be known as Netscape Communications Corporation.
Netscape released its flagship Navigator product in October 1994, and it took off the next year. Microsoft, which had so far missed the Internet wave, now entered the fray with its Internet Explorer product, hastily purchased from Spyglass Inc. This began the browser wars, the fight to gain control of the web browser market between the two giants.
The wars put the web in the hands of millions of ordinary PC users, but showed how commercialization of the internet could ruin standards efforts. Both Microsoft and Netscape liberally incorporated proprietary extensions to HTML in their products, and tried to gain an edge by product differentiation. The wars ended in 1998 when it became clear that Netscape's declining marketshare trend was irreversible. This was in part due to Microsoft's integrating its browser with its operating system and bundling deals with OEMs; the company faced antitrust litigation on these charges.
Netscape responded by open sourcing its product, creating mozilla. This did nothing to slow Netscape's rapid decline to irrelevance; mozilla has since evolved into a stable and powerful browser suite with a small but steady marketshare. Opera, a speedy browser popular in handheld devices was released in 1996 and remains a niche player in the PC web browser market.
While the Macintosh scene too has traditionally been dominated by Internet explorer and Netscape, the future appears to belong to Safari which is based on the KHTML rendering engine of the open source Konqueror browser. Safari is the default on MacOS X.
In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet explorer would no longer be made available as a separate product but would be part of the evolution of its Windows platform, and that no more releases for the Macintosh would be made.
Different browsers can be distinguished from each other by the features they support. Modern browsers and web pages tend to utilise many features and techniques that did not exist in the early days of the web. As noted earlier, the browser wars helped oversee a rapid and chaotic expansion of browser and World Wide Web feature sets.
The following is a list of some of these elements and features:
Web and web browser features
Opera's "Small-Screen Rendering" is a special way to reformat webpages to fit inside the small screen width of a smartphone, thereby eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling.
Examples of web browsers
Graphical
Gecko-based browsers
Internet Explorer-based browsers
KHTML-based browsers
Other Browsers
Text-based
Early browsers which are no longer being further developed
See also: History of the Internet, Browser exploit, Browser-based software, Accessibility.