WizGidget

According to Wikipedia, the first web browser was something called WorldWideWeb or Nexus, and came out in early 1991. In early 1993 Mosaic came out of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in University of Illinois and within a year displaced Nexus.  Back then your choices were pretty much Mosaic or Lynx, but Lynx was strictly text-based — it didn’t understand pictures.  Several of the folks who developed Mosaic then went off to develop Netscape commercially, and then Mozilla and its more recent offspring Firefox and Seamonkey.  Along about 1995, Microsoft decided they needed to get into the game and came out with Internet Explorer, or Internet Exploiter as I call it.  Interestingly, they also started out with the Mosaic browser, with their own “tweaks”.    Another browser called Opera came out in late 1994, which is still available today.

A number of other browsers that came and went over the years.  The main ones these days are Internet Explorer (for Windows users), Firefox or Seamonkey which are pretty much the same browser, Safari, Opera, and Google’s Chrome browser.

Internet Explorer (IE) continues to improve over time, especially regarding support for internet standards.  While IE has been available for Mac’s in times past, it’s currently a windows-only product.  I noticed they won’t be supporting Windows XP and earlier for IE9.

Firefox was pretty much the front-runner with IE, having replaced the previous Mozilla.  Firefox has been a fairly innovative web browser, quickly adopting new features such as “tabbed” web browsing.  A source of frustration has been websites that have adopted Microsoft technology that makes their website work only for Internet Explorer.  I’ve solved that problem with an IETab plugin for Firefox, so at least I can view these pages within my Firefox window.

Recently son Jesse became frustrated with some bugs with the Firefox browser, and tried out the Google Chrome browser.  I decided to take a look at it for the sake of this article.  It’s actually a pretty interesting browser.  The Google folks have pretty much thrown the baby out with the bath water and started over.  The rendering engine is based on something called WebKit, which is also used for the Mac web browser Safari.  They also rewrote the Javascript engine from scratch.  The whole thing is designed to be sleek and fast.  You may have noticed that some of the current smartphones are based on Google Chrome.

Safari is Apple’s answer to web browsing, but the browser is also available for Windows.  As mentioned, it’s based on the WebKit rendering engine.  It’s a fairly good web browser.

Opera is off on its own, having different roots than the other mentioned browsers. Opera is very innovative: they’re the originator of tabbed browsing.

I’d suggest downloading and trying each of these browsers.   Use each one for a week or so, you’ll know if you like it enough to switch.   You can find them by doing a google (or whatever) search for the browser names that I’ve mentioned: Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, Chrome or Opera.

Often when I help someone with their home or business PC, they will refer to their web browser (Internet Explorer or similar) as “the Internet”.   While their web browser is a window into the Internet, they aren’t the same thing.  The Internet is just an electronic network that allows computers in different locations to “talk” to each other, just as we use the telephone to talk to another person.  Computers for the most part don’t talk like we do, but the process is very similar.

Generally you know more or less who you’re going to talk to, in order to get something to happen or get a desired piece of information.  You may have to look up their phone number by using their name to get their number.  This lookup function on the internet is called “DNS” for Domain Name Service — it’s an automagic 411 service.  Sometimes when you try to go to a website with your browser and get a “server not found” error, the issue isn’t that your internet connection is down, but rather that for some reason DNS didn’t work — it wasn’t able to look up the “number” for the server (computer) that runs the website you seek.

Sometimes you don’t need to look up a phone number, you just remember it.  Computers do the same thing with the Internet — they “cache” addresses that they’ve looked up recently.  In a way they’re backwards to humans whose short-term memory goes first: computers don’t store the numbers long term, usually just a few minutes to a few hours.

There’s also many types of “conversations” that go over the Internet.  Most people are familiar with websites, which are accessed by a “URL” which means Uniform Resource Locator — this is the “http://www.wizgidget.com” stuff you put in the addresss bar or location bar of your web browser.

Actually websites are generally a special subset of a URL: they begin with “http” or “https”.  The http designator means “Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol”.  Pretty much all communications on the Internet use some form of “Protocol”, you’d think it was a realm of diplomacy.  HyperText Transfer Protocol is the method by which web pages are downloaded.  The https designator is the same thing as http, except that the information is encrypted before it is sent across the ‘net.  Thats why websites that need security, like your bank or online stores, use https in the URL.  HyperText Transfer Protocol defines how the information will be sent to your web browser.  It will always start with a file that defines structurally how the page will look.  It may also contain links to pictures or other content like video clips and so forth that will also be downloaded and displayed in the same page.

There are other protocols as well.  FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a common one that is generally used when you need to download a file, such as software you want to install.

Next week we’ll investigate some of the alternate web browsers that are available, such as Safari, Chrome, and others.