BROWSERS

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BROWSERS

Whenever we use the terms ‘logging on to the Internet’, ‘browsing’, or ‘surfing the Internet’, we generally mean using the system’s browser. The word “browser” has had a circumstantial coining since the Internet as a whole is a collection of Web pages, and when we surf the Internet we actually browse a variety of Web pages—hence the word browser. In this section, we will talk about the most popular browsers today.

sitemap

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http://enet010.blogspot.com/
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http://enet010.blogspot.com/2008/06/safari.html
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Safari

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Safari

This is one browser that is dedicated to the Mac Operating
System. For the general public, Macintoshes have always been
computers that you want to own, but not necessarily use for work.
However, there are a niche set of users who swear by the
Macintosh for their daily tasks.

Safari was a browser that toppled Internet Explorer as the
default browser in the Macintosh. It made its debut on June 23,
2003 and was the default browser in the OS X v 10.3 operating system.

With the release of Mac OS X v10.4, Safari is the only Web
browser included with the operating system.

Safari uses Apple’s WebKit application framework for rendering
Web pages and for running JavaScript. WebKit is comprised of
two other frameworks which are WebCore an HTML parser based
on KHTML and JavaScriptCore which is based on KJS.
The Safari browser is a delight to use. It has a bookmark management
scheme, contains the integrated Apple QuickTime multimedia
technology (obviously!) and also features tabbed browsing.
The Google search engine box is the default search engine for the
browser. Other features include software that automatically fill
out Web forms and spell check entries into Web page text fields.
The latest version of Safari was released on April 29, 2005 and
includes a built in RSS and Atom reader. It also includes a private
browsing mode (which does not record any information of your
Web visit) and Parental Controls. It now also has the ability for saving
Web sites completely as Web Archives.

In this section, we have talked about browsers from the past
and those available currently. A browser, as mentioned earlier, is
the first gateway to the Internet for any user across the planet—
irrespective of the OS used. Browser evolution is a constant and
consistent process, and newer browsers such as Avant and Deepnet
provide more functionality to your browsing without weighing
down your computer resources. For now, you should choose the
browser that best suits your needs.

Mozilla FireFox

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Mozilla FireFox

Mozilla Firefox is the hottest new browser on the scene and it has
taken computers users worldwide by storm. Firefox has made a
measurable depression in the market share of the world’s favorite
browser and that too in an era when users are taking to computers
like a duck to water.

Firefox has quite a history of its own, a very young but interesting
history. Firefox began not as Firefox, but as Phoenix, which
was made available to the public on September 23, 2002. The first
build of the browser which was the 0.1 version was not available
as an installer, but as an executable. You needed to click on the
executable to start the browser. The Phoenix browser used a large
amount of Mozilla source code and the initial release was codenamed
“Pescadero”, Spanish for “angler”.

Feature-wise it was extremely primitive, but it still contained some useful features Mozilla Firefox such as a popup blocker, tabbed browsing and an integrated download manager. However, shortcut features such as writing the URL then pressing [Ctrl] + [Enter] to automatically fill in the www. and “.com” parts of the URL were not available in version 0.1. Phoenix 0.2 was released a few days later on 10 October 2002 and had plenty of more features compared to the previous release.The major change in this version was the tool bar which had undergone a complete change. The side bar made its first appearance in this version.

Other enhancements were implemented including new options to the preferences section. Now users were able to disable Java and edit some tabbed-browsing options. Phoenix 0.2 also introduced the ability to add extensions and themes to the browser. Phoenix version 0.3 was the first release of Mozilla that had an integrated search engine by default in the toolbar. The Mozilla team at the time was concentrating on enhancing the browser and spent most of their time on doing that. Although this release had bug fixes, it was still buggy and unstable.

The next major change came with the release of the Firebird
browser. Yes, Mozilla changed the name of the browser from
Phoenix to Firebird. This was done to avoid trademark issues with
a company called Phoenix Technologies, which makes a browser of
its own. After months of brainstorming, the Mozilla team rested
on a new name, Firebird. However, the name Firebird had to be
changed again later because Firebird was the name of an open
source development project that makes a relational database.
The general look and feel of the browser was also changed to
support the name change. The term “Preferences” turned into
“Options”, and the Options window obtained some eye candy. If
Firebird 0.6 crashed, the user was now able to submit a message
to the developers about this error. The downside to this new
browser was the increase in the file size which was an increase
by about 6MB.

With all the other bug fixes and releases happening in a span
of over a few months, the next change was the re-christening of
the browser, again. As mentioned earlier, Firebird was the name of
an open source development project that makes a relational database
and to avoid the legal issues the Mozilla team settled for the
name Firefox after some further brain-storming and research in
trademark names. This was mainly because it was closely similar
to its previous name, Firebird. With the new name came a new
logo: the now famous image of the Flaming Red Fox wrapped
around the Globe. Staying true to the logo, the browser spread like
wildfire in the coming days.Firefox 0.8 was the first release to feature a Windows installer. All the previous versions were zip files containing an executable. The theme of the browser remained the same, almost. However, improvements were made to the toolbar features. The default search engine was Google and you also had the option of installing (adding) newersearch engines. The installer was also unique since it gave users the option to install the browser with or without the developer tools.

Soon, Firefox PR 0.10 was released. This was the first build to
let users use RSS feeds to read in their bookmarks. Other default
search engines such as Google.com, Dictonary.com, Ebay.com,
Amazon.com and Yahoo were also added to this version of the
browser. Other improvements in this release were a lot of bug fixes
and security patches.

Finally, version 1.0 codenamed Phoenix was released in
November 9, 2004. It had support for English, French, Chinese,
Hebrew, Japanese, Italian and hordes of other languages. As soon
was this was made available, downloads of this browser reached a
peak and it was downloaded over 1 million times in one day! This
speaks oodles about the quality of the browser and the acceptance
level of Firefox among users worldwide.

Currently as we write, the latest version of Firefox is 1.0.4. The
strongest point of this browser is that it is open source. You can
make a million modifications to it, customise it and just keep
adding… There are thousands of extensions, themes and add-ons
available for Firefox and with each passing day, the number grows.
However, this may also be a drawback, as sometimes too many
extensions can cause problems as well.

Opera

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Opera

Opera has always been seen as a browser for users who do not trust
IE and want something faster and lighter than Netscape. The
Opera browser was started in 1994 as a research project in
Norway’s telecom company Telenor. Two engineers from the same
company developed the browser Opera for the company’s intranet.
On July 14th 1996, Opera’s co-founder Jon von Tetzchner made the
first public announcement of Opera on UseNet and Opera came
into being for the general public.

Opera was written from a scratch and is not based on the
NCSA Mosaic code or interface methodology (as Internet
Explorer or Netscape are.) This gives it some unique browsing
features such as page zoom, a multi-document interface browsing
environment and mouse gestures. It has an extremely small
footprint and boasts of an impressive feature set, with great support for HTML, XML, WML, CSS (one of the best implementations),
JavaScript, DOM and Java.

Opera Series 1 was not released for the public and was called
MultiTorg Opera. This version was used for the Telenor Intranet.
The first public version of Opera was the Series 2. The first version is a Norwegian demo version of Opera 2.0 that was included
with a PC Magazine and loaded only local Norwegian pages.
Series 3 was the first coming in terms of acceptance for Opera
worldwide. Version 3.62 was the first version of Opera in terms of
features, stability and speed. CSS support was exceptional in this
version of Opera.

Opera Beta 4 was released in March 2000 and had support for
most of CSS2, all of CSS1, HTML4, XML, and WML. This version was
based on a cross-platform core and facilitated the release of Opera
for different Operating Systems. A new integrated e-mail client
was also included in this version. The first versions of Opera 4 were quite stable and buggy and it was after the release of 4.02 that the browser actually became useful.

The Opera 5 release was noticed by the general public, since
this time the browser was not on a 30-day trial period but was adsupported hence people could use the browser long after the 30-
day period. New features that were added to this release were
mouse-gestures, Instant Messaging features hot list panels and an
integrated search. In fact, many users are still using this version of the browser till date.

The long awaited Unicode support was introduced in the
Opera 6 release and a new SDI/MDI interface was also introduced
in the same release. The Opera 6 series was one of the most stable
and it was with this release that Opera garnered its own fans and
a cult following, but was still miles away from making a dent in
either Netscape’s or Internet Explorer’s market shares.

Opera 7 was released in early 2003 and featured a brand new
rendering engine called Presto. This engine enhanced and expanded
its support for standards and included W3C DOM and the Small
Screen Rendering technique for handheld devices. The interface
was redone entirely with a custom cross-platform skinning system
which significantly reduced resource usage, keyboard shortcuts,
mouse gestures, menus and toolbars.

Other new features that were included in this release were features such FastForward,Notes and Slideshow, which made the user experience even more enjoyable. A new news and mail client called M2 was introducedin this version as well as a RSS news reader and an IRC chat client.Opera 8 was released in early 2005 and is currently in version 8.0.1. The major reason for Opera being accepted publicly was not because of its compliance in standards with other browsers, but because of the non-standard browsing enhancements that were
absent in its competitors. It is light weight and has its own cult of fans. It has innovative features and is one of the most used
browsers on mobile devices.

Currently, Opera has started making inroads in other embedded
systems platforms as well. Opera’s market share is starting to
make a bit of a dent with users sticking to this alternative browser
rather than using Internet Explorer or Netscape. Plus, many of
Opera’s innovative features are finding their way into other
browsers as well. One of them is FireFox, the browser that we will
be talking about next.

Netscape

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Netscape

Netscape has quite some history behind it as a browser. Netscape
started out as collaboration between Silicon Graphics founder Jim
Clark and Marc Andreessen in mid-1994 to form Mosaic
Communications. Mosaic Communications later went on to be
renamed Netscape Communications. Andreessen had been a leader
in University of Illinois in a software project called Mosaic.

With the advent of the Internet, both Jim and Marc saw the oncoming wave of the Internet, and understood that browsers would be the primary tool to access it, thus making Web-browsing software a huge potentia money-spinner. Within a brief half-year period, many of the original people from the NCSA Mosaic project were working for Netscape, and Netscape was released to the public in December 1994.

Netscape became a big success within months of its release.
And some of the contributing factors to its success were the pace.
with which software releases took place. New innovations and
improvements were constantly being made to the browser and
that made it “the” browser to browse the Internet with. Newer
HTML capabilities were added with every release to Netscape and
in most cases, these enhancements and improvements were much,
much better than any other browser could provide at that time. By
the summer of 1995, it was a good bet that if you were browsing
the Internet, you were doing so with a Netscape browser—by some
accounts Netscape had over 80 per cent market share, and
Netscape’s browser helped cement their own dominance.

Enter Windows 95 and Internet Explorer, and Netscape met
with their first worthy competitor. Microsoft made Operating
Systems for a living, and browsers were a spin-off from the OS. For
sometime though, Internet Explorer played second fiddle to
Netscape and was always playing catch up. There were two advantages
that Netscape could not deny that Microsoft had. First that
Microsoft was way above Netscape in terms of market penetration,
and secondly, Internet Explorer was free while Netscape was not.
Netscape wanted to counter this situation in a manner that
would impress its clients and in March 1996 launched Netscape
2.
With the launch of Netscape 2 a bevy of must-have breakthrough
features (frames, Java, Javascript and Plug-ins) which
helped distance it from the pack. To counter the “free” Internet
Explorer browser issue, Netscape gave it away for free to carefully
selected target audiences, such as students and teachers
which helped immeasurably to spread the word and to ensure
Netscape’s dominance.

Netscape 3 rolled out in August 96 at almost the same time
as Internet Explorer 3.0 and this flared off a war amongst the
two mammoths. Although, Netscape was still the dominant one
in the browser market, Internet Explorer by then started making
their first dents in the browser market and eating into the
Netscape pie. One of the improvements that Netscape 3 browser boasted off was “mouseover” which means showing one image when a link is highlighted and a different one when it is not.

At the time,Netscape 3 was considered the benchmark for all other browser and if you wanted to be in the browser market, you would be better off supporting all features that Netscape 3 supported.
June 1997 saw the release of Netscape 4 while IE 4 was released
in October 1994 and things started to go wrong for Netscape. Both
browsers used DHTML (the changing of CSS by means of
JavaScript), but had their own implementations and did not pay
attention to how the other browser worked.

Suddenly Web sites that used DHTML (or CSS with JavaScript) could be displayed in Netscape and not in IE and vice versa. But Microsoft acting mostly on hindsight went back to the drawing board and wrote the code right from the scratch for IE 4 in the process doing away with the legacy code.

On the other hand, Netscape tried to add the new features on
top of Netscape 3’s code engine, a decision that was to have grave
consequences. Another factor was that Microsoft’s DHTML implementation was user friendly and attracted both Web designers and developers alike who could write or design programs without having to refer to textbooks. Netscape’s implementation of DHTML though remained in the realm of elite programmers who had code for lunch, dinner and sex.

The Internet in 1997 was looking up with mass sales of computers
and new users wanting to hook up to the Internet. They did
not want to know what software to download, what software to
use as a browser; all they wanted was the Internet “installed” in
the computer, for them to click on. As mentioned earlier,
Microsoft was in the business of making OSes and Windows was
by far the only OS that most non-geek users were happy with. With
Internet Explorer being freely available along with the OS,
Netscape suffered a major setback in their browser business.

These surges of new users were unburdened with the history of
the WWW and along with that the existence of Netscape as a
browser, and as a result Netscape came crashing down from the
once dominating Internet browser market. As a last ditch effort,
Netscape did away with the shareware tag and made Netscape a
completely free browser killing their main source of income.
However, this solution did not turn out to be Netscape’s saviour.
The newer code of Netscape 4 incorporated in the Netscape 3 core
started showing bugs and extremely odd ones at that.

Netscape was going down, and fast! Finally, Netscape announced that it was going open source. This was the re-birth of Mozilla as an open source project, but the deliverables were still about 4 years away, making the wait too long for most.

Currently, Netscape has been sidelined by the barrage of new
browsers such as Firefox and Opera. Features such as tabbed
browsing, which was the mainstay of Netscape, has found new
homes in these other browsers. The current version of Netscape
is 8.0.2 and is based on the Mozilla Firefox core. For now,
Netscape is dependent on the Mozilla Project and the real work
actually happens there rather than at Netscape. More about this
when we talk about Mozilla!

Microsoft Internet Explorer

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Microsoft Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer arrived at a time when Netscape was the master
of the game. Internet Explorer 1.0 debuted with the second version
of Microsoft Windows 95 that was called, simply enough, “Windows
95 with Internet Explorer.” When Windows 95 first made its appearance
in July 1995 it included inbuilt support for dial-up networking
and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) plus
other key technologies for connecting to the Internet. However, it
still depended on third party browsers, which at that time meant
Netscape.

With growing acceptance of the Internet, Microsoft suddenly
realised the potential of bundling in its own browser and thus
Internet Explorer (IE) was born. Internet Explorer technology was
originally shipped as the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus!
For Windows 95. Internet Explorer replaced the need for cumbersome,
manual installation steps required by many of the existing
shareware browsers.
Internet Explorer 2.0 arrived in November 1995 and was the first cross platform browser released by Microsoft and worked on
both Macintosh and 32-bit Windows. Internet Explorer 2.0 technology
introduced Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol as well as
support for HTTP cookies, Virtual Reality Modeling Language
VRML), and Internet newsgroups.

The next big Microsoft browser release was Internet Explorer
3.0 in August 1996, which had a completely rebuilt core and considered
one of the best browsers of the time. This browser was
designed for Windows 95 and included features that users immediately
took to such as Internet Mail and News 1.0 and Windows
Address Book. Later, Microsoft NetMeeting and Windows Media
Player were also released. Internet Explorer could now display GIF and JPG files, play MIDI sound files and streaming audio files
without the assistance of other applications. For Web programmers,
though it was a different story altogether, since IE3
allowed for a choice of scripting languages and also Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS).

Moving onwards, Internet Explorer 4 made its debut in 1997
and was designed for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.
Another major add-on to the release of IE4 was Outlook Express,
which would be installed in the default installation and was an
upgrade from the previous Internet Mail and News application.
This was the first offering from Microsoft to compete with
Netscape Communicator in terms of a mail client being installed
with a browser.

This was also a major release for Web programmers since the
introduction of DHTML as a scripting language in IE4, Web pages
could be designed more dynamically. Users could now expand
menus with a click or drag images and objects around on a Web
page. The Web started to look more like the applications and
games that people were accustomed to and less like a static series
of pages.
In September 1998, Internet Explorer 5 was released. DHTML
functionality was improved with more features and with emerging
Web commerce ideas.

Internet Explorer 6 was first released in 2001 with the
release of Windows XP operating system. Later on, IE 6
was released for other Windows flavours. One of the major
improvements in IE6 was the implementation of privacy and
security functionality of the browser. Since privacy and
security had become customer priorities, Microsoft implemented
tools that support Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a
technology under development by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C).

Internet Explorer has also been available for the Macintosh for a long time. Although Netscape Navigator was the browser bundled with the Mac OS for a long time, it stopped in 1997 when
Internet Explorer became the default browser for the Mac. But
with the release of Safari browser for the Mac OS, development of
IE for the Mac was stopped.

Today, for any Windows user logging on to the Internet for the
first time, the blue “e” icon sitting on the desktop is the gateway
to the Internet with the default installation of Windows. To use
any other browser, you will need to download or source it from
somewhere and then install it. The little “e” on the other hand is
ubiquitous, and all you need to do is double-click.
So where do we go from here?

IE 7 which was scheduled for release along with Longhorn will
now be released prematurely. Newer browsers such as Firefox
(which we will be talking about soon) will be present, but let’s
face facts, Internet Explorer is here to stay, never mind the antitrust
lawsuits.

The First Browser – WorldWideWeb (Nexus)

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The First Browser – WorldWideWeb (Nexus)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web or WWW as we
know it today in 1989, deploying a working system by 1990.
Berners-Lee was the first to invent the browser, and it was simply
called WorldWideWeb since it was the only way to see the Web.
Tim later rechristened this browser ‘Nexus’, to distinguish
between the program and the abstract information space “www”
which was typed in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

WorldWideWeb was written in Objective-C and it would let users
browse “http:”, “news:”, “ftp:” and local “file:” spaces.
Tim wrote the program for this browser on a NeXT computer.
The browser was the best at the time, since it was the only one. If
you look at the browser closely, you will see that buttons and features
in the browser look similar in Internet Explorer. Here’s a
brief low- down on the functionality of the browser.

The WorldWideWeb (Nexus) BrowserThe menu bar looked like a primitive version of the WindowS Desktop, and clicking on it would provide a list of options similar
to the Windows of today. The Navigate menu had things such as
“Back”, “Next” and “Previous”, and the last two were useful when
you followed a link from a list of links—they meant “go back a step
and then take the next link from the same page.”

The “Link” menu had options such as “Mark all” which would
remember the URL of the current page where you were. “Mark
selection” would make a link target for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URL of that fragment. “Link to Marked”
would make a link from the current selection to whatever URL you
had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere
interesting, hitting [Command] + [M], going to the document
you were writing and selecting some text, and then hitting
[Command] + [L]. “Link to new” would create a new window and
prompt for a URL, and then make a link from the selection to the
new document. You never saw the URLs—you could of course
always find documents by following the link to them.

Using the “Style” menu, you could load a style sheet to define
how you wanted your documents (Web pages) rendered. You could
also set the paragraph style to an HTML element’s style such as
heading1, heading 2, list element, etc., and then this implied an
HTML structure in which the document was written back.

At that time, the “X” close box was unique to NeXT, and according
to Tim, Windows copied it. The broken X in the “Tim’s home
page” window means that the document was in the process of
being edited and was unsaved. Now that we have talked about the
first Web browser, lets move on to find more about other browsers

BROWSERS

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BROWSERS