Download Mozilla Firefox, a free Web browser. Firefox is created by a global non-
A web
browser (commonly referred to
as a browser) is a software application for retrieving, presenting and
traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.
An nformation resource is
identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) and may be a web page,
image, video or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users
easily to navigate their browsers to related resources.
Although browsers are primarily intended to use
the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems.
The major web browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet
Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb and was later renamed Nexus. The first commonly available
web browser with a graphical user interface was Erwise. The
development of Erwise was initiated by Robert
Cailliau.
n 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc
Andreessen with
the release of Mosaic (later Netscape),
"the world's first popular browser", which made the World Wide Web
system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. An dreesen's
browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s. The introduction of Mosaic in
1993 – one of the first graphical web browsers – led to an explosion in web
use. Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, soon started his own
company, named Netscape, and
released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became
the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak
(see usage share of web browsers).
Opera debuted in 1996; it has never achieved
widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012
according to Net Applications. Its
Opera-mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting to 1.1% of
overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser
market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on
several other embedded systems,
including Nintendo's Wii video game console.
In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become
the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive
browser using the open source software
model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable
following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the
release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7% of
browser use. As
of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January
2003; as of April 2011, it had a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 7% of the
entire browser market.
The most recent major entrant to the browser
market is Chrome, first released in September 2008.
Chrome's take-up has increased significantly year by year, by doubling its
usage share from 8% to 16% by August 2011. This increase seems largely to be at
the expense of Internet Explorer, whose share has tended to decrease from month
to month. In
December 2011, Chrome overtookI nternet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser
but still has lower usage than all versions of Internet Explorer combined.
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