Just Browsing, Thanks.
The method in which we enjoy the fruits which the internet bears often slips by without so much as a casual thought. You click a thing, a webpage loads, you find what you’re looking for, you close that thing and carry on about your day. This browsing of websites is actually facilitated by a natty piece of software called, unsurprisingly, a browser. Just like we’re blessed with choices for airlines and peanut butter, we’re also able to be choosy with how we experience web pages. But what’s the difference? Aren’t we all just looking at the same internet?
Web browsers as a matter of fact perform a fairly important task. You see, the way a website exists in its raw form is actually just lines of code which, without a browser, wouldn’t be very pretty to look at. What’s happening when you load up a website on your computer or smartphone is, that code is being read and interpreted to give the layout, content and functionality that we all know and love from our favorite sites. The very first browser, created by a British gentleman by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, appeared in 1990. This program was called WorldWideWeb and, as our first fun fact, is where the abbreviation WWW comes from.
While Berners-Lee’s creation would serve as a springboard for innovation in sharing what would eventually become early versions of the websites we know today, it wasn’t until 1993 and the dawn of wider adoption of the internet itself that Mosaic appeared. Mosaic was the first browser intended for widespread use and for the first time gave PC owners an easy way to access sites, images and chat rooms. The following year, Mosaic became the slightly more well-known Netscape Navigator, which subsequently became the MUCH more well known and personal favorite of mine: Firefox. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) browser of our generation was the arguably late to the party Internet Explorer from Microsoft, which actually grew from its 1995 launch to being responsible for 96% of web usage in 2001.
As it stands today the landscape for browser choice boils down to 4 main players. While what’s available will vary very slightly based on which operating system you use, in order of popularity we have Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari browser, Firefox and finally Microsoft’s 2015 replacement for Internet Explorer - Edge. What’s nice is you’re free to load up any combination of these, or branch out into lesser known examples. While your computer will insist you have a single choice for a default browser, using multiple doesn’t have any real ill affect. Given their ubiquity as a technology, it’s quite surprising how much difference there is between flavors for your internet experience.
We learned before that a web browser interprets the data from a website in order to display it. One key difference is in the way this data is handled between programs, hence you may have noticed messages such as “This site looks best in Chrome”. Small changes in the way a browser displays a site can ruin the hard work of the site’s designers, so it’s natural they might try to steer your browsing habits. Another difference is the now-commonplace plugins, which allow you to extend the functionality of your program to include things like ad blocking and page saving.
What’s most important is that, given a browser’s importance in your enjoyment of the web, you find one which best fits you. Preference, as with most technology, will also be a factor; and that’s okay! Spend some time internet exploring and see if your favorite sites really do look better in Chrome.
Richard Noble
-Founder
This article originally appeared in The Glasgow Courier.