While developing a site, we should try to make it compatible to as many browsers as possible. Specially site should be compatible to major browsers like Explorer, FireFox, Netscape, Opera and Safari.
History of the web browser:
The NCSA Mosaic Web browser in 1993 – one of the first graphical Web browsers.
Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992.
Marc 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.
Opera first appeared in 1996, having 2% browser usage share as of April 2010. It has a substantial share of the fast-growing mobile phone Web browser market.
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of October 2009, it has a dominant share of Apple-based Web browsing, accounting for just under 5% of the entire browser market as of April 2010. Its rendering engine, called WebKit, is also running in the standard browsers of several mobile phone platforms, including the iPhone OS, Google Android, Nokia S60 and Palm WebOS.
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's WebKit-based Chrome, first released in September 2008. As of April 2010, it has a 7% usage share.
Function:
The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), into the browser.
The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files.
HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page.
Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets (A Java applet is an applet delivered to the users in the form of Java bytecode. Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine (JVM)). Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.
Interactivity in a web page can also be supplied by Javascript, which usually does not require a plug-in. Javascript can be used along with other technologies to allow "live" interaction with the web page's server via AJAX.
A cookie, also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie, is a piece of text stored by a user's web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data.
