1.3.1. Browser

As mentioned above a browser is a software application that runs on the user machine and enables the user to display and interact with Web Pages hosted by Web Servers.

Originally, a browser was a software able to send requests with HTTP to a server and interpret the answers in case the answers were in HTML.
In the meantime, various multimedia elements are implemented in some browsers. That's why they are now able to interpret other formats (e.g. XML) and not only HTML.

There are several browser programs available. There are browsers that are named differently but based on the same software (e.g. Netscape and Mozilla Firefox). There are also browsers that feature the same name but are based on different software (e.g. Internet Explorer for Mac and Internet Explorer for Windows).

The presentation of HTML etc. is on different browser programs or system software sometimes different. Particularly font-family and font-size can vary significantly. The following table shows a list of browsers and their capability.

	HTML	XHTML	Raster	SVG	XML (XSL)	Logo	Homepage	Availability
Firefox 3	+	+	+	+	+		Firefox	OpenSource
Opera 9.5	+	+	+	+	+		Opera	Free Download
Internet Explorer 7	+	+	+		+		Internet Explorer	Free Download
Safari 3.1	+	+	+	+	+		Safari	Free Download
Netscape 8.1	+	+	+		+		Netscape	Free Download (support stopped)
Konqueror 3.5	+	+	+	(+) included in the system	+		Konqueror	OpenSource
Lynx 2.8	+						Lynx	OpenSource (browses only text)

The different browsers run on the following platforms:

Windows

Macintosh

Linux

If you are interested in more information about browsers in generall or about particular browsers have a look at the W3C Schools Homepage. There you also find monthly statistics about which browsers are used to call that homepage.

There exist other browser softwares, which are not introduced in this lesson.