In early days of Internet, many sites used to be viewed in specific browser like Netscape or Internet explorer. Some web pages are best viewed with specific browsers but nowadays these labels seem to be rarer. The web designers these days put total efforts to promote their websites over the search engines. There are certain principles to make the website design compatible for different browsers and operating systems. You can hire a web design professional to work for you or you can design it on your own. Design the website with fixed widths, as designing for the 1024x768 screen resolution will make the visitors to scroll the page horizontally, this might irritate the visitors and they might avoid visiting your website. As there are various operating systems and web browsers which support different screen resolutions you need to be very careful while creating your website design.
There are many colour limitations, while designing a website. The colour palettes on windows and Mac PC are different; the colour that looks good on windows will not look the same on any other computer. Different computers have different colour palettes and the monitors. The colour codes in 16-bit colour palette and 24-bit colour palette are not same, except black and white. The website has to be designed keeping in mind that the 16-bit colour setting is the best suitable and can be viewed perfectly on different systems. The web design experts generally get complaints regarding the screen resolution they use while creating web page. They do not think that the visitors do not have the same large screen resolution.
The websites designed with frames provide smaller area to the people to view the content of the website. The web designer needs to check the website in different screen resolutions like 800x600 and 640x468, if it does not functions properly, the site very difficult to use in such situations. The visitors would have to scroll horizontally and vertically to read the content due to which you might lose many visitors. Even a worst situation can be there if the web designer removes the scroll bar and the visitors would not be able to scroll up/down/ left/right to view the whole page. A unique website design has to be displayed correctly on all the standard browsers. It is best to adjust the website to suit a less helpful browser with CSS; it saves a lot of time of the website designer.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6359224
Many people are excited by the idea of venturing onto the internet. In fact, going online for the first time is relatively simple. It is no more difficult than installing a new piece of software. To connect to the internet you need a modem and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). You also need a web browser.
A web browser is a piece of software that allows you to access Web sites and navigate between them. Once your browser is set up, you can explore the fascinating world beyond. All web browser are the same in principle. They contain an address box, in which you type a web address, and an area in which web pages are displayed.
Every Web address is unique, in the same way that your telephone number is. It's helpful to think of a web address as a telephone number, whereby you dial the site's address to view it. Web address tells you that the site belongs to the World Wide Web.
Two of the most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you bought your personal computer in 1999 or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer will almost certain have come pre-installed on your system.
Whether or not your personal computer came with its own browser, your internet service provider may also provide you with one in its start up kit. This could be Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but some ISPs, such as AOL and CompuServe, provide you with their own specialty designed Web browser.
You can have more than one Web browser, just as you can have more than one word processor or spreadsheet program. When your internet service provider software first loads, look for a button that says "Internet," "Browse the Internet," or something close to this. When you click on this it will start up your web browser ready to surf the internet.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3010495
A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that Mosaic was the first popular World Wide Web browser to mix image elements with text. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992, released to the public in 1993 for non commercial use, and orphaned in 1997.
Mosaic project alumni and other users established Mosaic Communications Corporation which eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. A different group established Spyglass Inc. with their own version of Mosaic. When Microsoft was not allowed to license the Netscape Navigator, they made a deal with Spyglass for fees partly based on browser sales. Microsoft called their browser Internet Explorer and introduced it as an add on to Windows 95. MS bundled IE with later versions of Windows, thus having no sales revenues on the browser, which caused Spyglass to threaten legal action, resulting in $8 million settlement to Spyglass.
Netscape had initial market dominance, based on user acceptance. IE gained dominance via distribution with Windows. Such competition fostered both proprietary code and the evolution toward similar user interfaces. As of this writing, Netscape has been discontinued, and the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has continued Netscape concepts into the open source FireFox browser and related applications.
The Safari browser was developed by Apple Inc. for distribution with Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta in January 2003 and is now available for Windows. It is claimed to be significantly faster than the alternatives.
The Opera browser ranks behind Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Netscape in popularity. It is now free for personal use. Some of its security concepts and other features have influenced development of the other main browsers.
A recent web template was made elastic ("fluid" or "liquid") using the DIV element instead of TABLE for layout and variable font sizes. A floating text box (DIV) was added so that it remained fixed as the user scrolled down through a page. The results looked great in FireFox 2.x, and nearly the same in Opera 9.x and Safari 3.x, except that "fixed" box scrolled in Safari. For Internet Explorer 7.x, the fixed box scrolled, spacings differed, text background colors didn't stay with highlighted text, and some menu colors (for active, hover, visited links) were totally screwed up. In other words, IE 7, supposedly free of bugs found in prior releases, is not usable for this design template.
Rather than load down the template design with work-arounds for IE, it was replaced with a TABLE layout for positioning, plus some other HTML Tags/Elements on menus and text selections. It still has elasticity and variable font sizes from dimensioning mostly in "em" and "%" rather than "px".
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/971399
People get used in calling internet browser and other related terms used to refer the former. Still, the question lies on what really is an Internet Browser?
An internet browser is simply used to access the internet and display searches that you want. It allows the graphics, texts and links to be displayed in the screen. Besides, it can also give multimedia resources like sounds and videos, though some may require you of plug-ins. Examples to this are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, AOL Explorer, Apple Safari, and Opera. One from these examples is necessary in searching and surfing the net.
There are about some common parts of the browsers that you may see from one to another. As such, some buttons like 'Back', 'Forward', 'Reload', 'Home', 'Search', 'Print', 'Stop', 'Location' and 'Bookmarks'. Discussing it further, below is a short definition of each.
The 'Back' button has the function of bringing you back from the previous site or page you had visited earlier.
'Forward' button will send you forward to the page you have visited before.
Next, the 'Reload' button will refresh and reload any page that you have in the screen, it is for purposes when the page you have entered don't load fully.
However, the 'Home' button upon clicking will bring your set homepage.
The 'Search' button is for purposes of shortcuts to search engines in the page.
Then, the 'Print' button makes sure that you are able to print the page that you like in the screen. Upon clicking, it will give you the hardcopy of the viewed page.
'Stop' button holds any loading page or commands any processing page from successfully performing its activity.
The 'Location' button allows you to enter the site that you want to visit; it also has the list of sites you visited before.
Lastly, the 'Bookmarks' will help create a shortcut to your previously viewed page and allows you to bookmark page you want.
Above are just few of those few similarities, while the others are unique from one browser to another. Like, Internet Explorer has features unique from the Mozilla, and vice-versa.
Article Source: http://goo.gl/9RqjO
Netscape Navigator also simply known as Netscape was once the most widely used web browser software. It effectively brought the Internet to millions of people, many of whom were by no means computer specialists. By 2002 this software had virtually disappeared, supplanted by Internet Explorer and to a lesser degree Mozilla Firefox. While Netscape is no longer with us, the changes that it brought to computers and the Internet ever present. Let's take a closer look at this magnificent software's history and the changes it brought.
By the early 1990s the Internet had been around for decades but remained unavailable to the general public. Simply put, accessing the Internet was expensive, complicated, and not very much fun. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet could now store hypertext pages accessible by browsers on a network. Two programming giants, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first graphics-based web browser Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic was very short lived. Andreessen and others founded Netscape Communications whose flagship software was Netscape Navigator.
This browser became available at the end of 1994. It was originally slated to be free for all non-commercial users. A few months later company policy changed and only
educational and non-profit institutions could use Netscape without charge. Shortly after its release Netscape became very, very popular. One of its special features was the ability to display web pages on the fly. Text and graphics started displaying on the user's computer screen immediately; competitive browsers would only display a page after loading all the graphics. Given the slow connections that were then the norm the difference was striking. Netscape users could work with the downloaded web pages. Users of competitive browsers had to be content staring at a blank screen, perhaps for a few minutes. Small wonder that Netscape was such a big hit.
Netscape worked on a wide variety of computer systems. What's more it looked and worked virtually the same on all of them. This browser also rapidly adopted many technical functions even if they were controversial such as cookies, said to attack personal privacy. Netscape experimented with delivering computer services via the web browser rather than via the operating system. As you might well imagine, Microsoft was unhappy with this perspective. It belatedly entered the browser wars with Internet Explorer, also an offshoot of Mosaic. By 1996 Internet Explorer caught up with Netscape, by 1999 Internet Explorer had clearly won the battle.
Why did Microsoft win? Here are several reasons. Netscape was a small company with a single major product while Microsoft was a giant. Netscape's revenue never equaled the interest paid on Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft had over 90% of the operating system market and had no trouble tying Internet Explorer into the operating system. This meant Windows users had immediate access to IE and many saw no need to download Netscape. Internet Explorer did have some technical advantages such as greater speed. I can't really cry over the Netscape owners, near the end of the millennium America Online purchased the company for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer peaked at about 95% web browser usage. It has since declined sharply while remaining number 1.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1941839
In the early 1990s there were many simple graphic-oriented World Wide Web browsers available. The first which reached widespread popularity was Mosaic, developed at NCSA. Several companies licensed it to create their own commercial browsers, such as Spy Mosaic and Spyglass Mosaic.
One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreesen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability, and it soon dominated the market, helped by the fact that "evaluation copies" of the browser were downloadable without restrictions or cost.
The term "browser wars" is the name given to the competition for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is most commonly used to refer to two specific periods of time: the particularly intense struggle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator during the late 1990s, from 2004 Mozilla came out with Firefox which became a growing threat for IE and eat into its market share, however it was Google's browser Chrome which came later and has today become the dominate browser in the market.
In 1995, the world wide web began to receive a great deal of attention, and netscape navigator was the dominant web browser but microsoft had just launched internet explorer, and included it in windows 95 and by then a browser war had begun. Over the years new versions of both internet explorer and netscape navigator were releasing at a rapid pace. With internet explorer 4, things changed as it offered much more then netscape and was a lot faster. Than internet explorer had dominated the web browser market, while netscape faded out. however things have changed recently as both Firefox and Chrome are the consumers choice today while chrome edges out Firefox as its a lot faster and its market share is growing everyday.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5914358
The first browser to be launched successfully was called Mosaic which was programmed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen in 1992 and released by 1993. During these years, the graphical services found online which are popular and dominating were from America Online (AOL), Prodigy and Compuserv. These online servicing companies do not provide Internet access.
Through Mosaic, Internet was opened for use of the common people. It gives easier ways to navigate and explore the World Wide Web and it is free. By mid-90's, Andreessen made a partnership with the former initiator of Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark and Netscape was born.
Netscape became number one for a while until Microsoft started pre-packaging its web browser into its Windows operating systems. Microsoft's Internet Explorer or IE was way behind Netscape in a lot of ways. IE had been criticized because of its abundant bugs, security problems and lack of conventionality to the standard protocols of the web. However, since a lot of new computer and internet users are unaware and unconcern of these risks, IE became the top choice for by 1998.
Netscape allowed the release of the source code of its browser the very same year. Because of this, the web browser was rewritten with substantial changes over the years that followed. Afterwards, Mozilla, an open source type of web browser, was born under Mozilla Organization.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3785473
Netscape was and is merely a teenager, just 14 years old and has now seen its last release. The final release distributed is 9.0.0.6 and will no longer be supported after May 1, 2008.
A little background and history of Netscape Navigator:
Born in 1994 as Mosaic it became Netscape and was sold to AOL for around $9 billion dollars. By the time Internet Explorer and Netscape had reached the fourth generation it started losing market share. Today the market share of Netscape is less than 1%.
As of July 2003 AOL Mozilla (Mosaic and Netscape based browser) was allowed to become independent and Mozilla became an open source project into a non-profit organization. Since then Mozilla has become an active player in the browser wars.
As a web designer, one of the activities that I perform when building a web site is to make sure the web site views the same in a variety of web browsers. Now I won't have to be testing with Netscape any more. I'll still be testing with FireFox (Mozilla), Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.
It's time to bid a fond farewell to an application that allowed for the every day internet user and lay person to enjoy the experience of surfing the web. So long old friend.
Read more: http://EzineArticles.com/1273085
Netscape had initial market dominance, based on user acceptance. IE gained dominance via distribution with Windows. Such competition fostered both proprietary code and the evolution toward similar user interfaces. As of this writing, Netscape has been discontinued, and the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has continued Netscape concepts into the open source FireFox browser and related applications.
The Safari browser was developed by Apple Inc. for distribution with Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta in January 2003 and is now available for Windows. It is claimed to be significantly faster than the alternatives.
The Opera browser ranks behind Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Netscape in popularity. It is now free for personal use. Some of its security concepts and other features have influenced development of the other main browsers.
A recent web template was made elastic ("fluid" or "liquid") using the DIV element instead of TABLE for layout and variable font sizes. A floating text box (DIV) was added so that it remained fixed as the user scrolled down through a page. The results looked great in FireFox 2.x, and nearly the same in Opera 9.x and Safari 3.x, except that "fixed" box scrolled in Safari. For Internet Explorer 7.x, the fixed box scrolled, spacings differed, text background colors didn't stay with highlighted text, and some menu colors (for active, hover, visited links) were totally screwed up. In other words, IE 7, supposedly free of bugs found in prior releases, is not usable for this design template.
Article Source: http://goo.gl/xDnIi
Netscape is a web browser available for both Mac and PC computers. While it was once the most popular web browser available, Netscape's popularity had decreased significantly by 2000. The Netscape browser is no longer being updated, but previous releases are still available for those who wish to install or reinstall the browser.
Instructions
Download the Netscape browser for Mac by going to the "Releases" page of the Netscape Archive website. You can find the link in "Resources" below. Click on the "Netscape 9.0.0.6 English" Mac OS X release.
Double-click on the downloaded disk image to open it. Select "Accept" to agree to the license agreement.
Reinstall Netscape by dragging the Netscape icon from the disk image to the applications folder and allowing it to copy to that location.
Read more: http://goo.gl/k8jwP
Updates on Netscape can be set to install automatically to save you a lot of time. Even though Netscape 8.1.2 is a stand-alone installation, meaning that this new version won't install straight with automatic updates, you can be sure that updates will continue to increase the effectiveness of your Web browser.
Instructions
Sign up for an Important Netscape Automatic Update
Go to Netscape's Web page (see Resources below).
Click on 'Tools' in the menu and then click on 'Options.'
Click on the panel marked 'Advanced.'
Click the 'Browser Update' panel and select your automatic updates choice from the radio buttons.
Click 'OK.'
Read more: http://goo.gl/ZQbTd
People sometimes ask their IT people, "What is the best internet browser?" or "What internet browser should I use?" There is no simple answer for this. Each person tends to have a particular internet browser that they like and generally recommend it to their friends and family. I believe each browser has its own pros, cons, and quirks such that there is no single best. In fact, I often recommend each general web user to have 2 separate browsers using different engines.
There are four main types of browser technologies these days. The biggest one is the Microsoft Internet Explorer family of browsers. Internet Explorer comes standard with windows (unless you are in the European Union). Internet explorer is the most exploited browser by hackers, partially because it has the most market share, and partly because of its use of ActiveX objects. If a user is careful and practices good browsing habits, Internet Explorer is as safe as the rest. I recommend all windows users at least have this installed because there are plenty of websites out there that require you to use it. Microsoft is notorious for having their websites only work in Internet Explorer.
The next most popular browser out there is Mozilla Firefox. This is the successor to the Netscape heritage and is overseen by the Mozilla foundation. Firefox was the first browser to incorporate a system for third party vendors to develop extensions and add-ons for it. There are almost two million add-ons for Firefox already. There are many useful extensions ranging from extra browser security to developer tools. This is the browser I suggest for both Windows and Mac users. I personally use it as my main browser due to all the developer tools offered from third parties like Google.
The third largest group is the Webkit browsers. Webkit is a layout and application framework. The three browsers in this group we are going to talk about are Apple's Safari, Google Chrome, and Comodo Dragon. Safari is the default web browser that comes with Mac OS. Over the years Apple has put a lot of effort into Safari, making it a solid browser with a slick responsive interface. It has also been released for Windows users to download for free. The last two are based on the Chromium engine. Chromium is an open source engine developed by Google to use in Chrome and is well known for its V8 JavaScript engine which is blazing fast. Chrome is Google's foray into the web browser world and it made huge waves when it hit in 2008. Since its release, Chrome has had 5 major version updates and now incorporates third party extensions much like Firefox. Dragon is developed by Comodo, a name brand in the security sector. It has similar features to Chrome but adds an extra layer of security for SSL connections. to be honest, the name of it makes it worth using just by itself. I encourage Windows users to pick up one of these if they want a third browser and I recommend that Mac users stick with Safari as their main browser.
Article Source: http://goo.gl/pBX6j
Instructions
Transfer Your Bookmarks and Settings to Firefox
Download Firefox from the Mozilla Web site (see Resources below) if you decide that changing Netscape's appearance isn't enough.
Open a fresh browser window through Firefox.
Click on 'File' and then click on 'Import.'
Click on Netscape in the radio button options.
Click the 'Next' button to continue the process of importing your bookmarks and cookies.
Wait while Firefox loads your bookmarks and cookies from Netscape. Click on the 'Finish' button to complete this task.
Read more: http://goo.gl/C2ZnP
When you set Netscape as your default browser, you can take advantage of all the great new features, including security updates, new skins and updated spyware blockers. Setting Netscape as your default browser is simple to do and will benefit the efficiency of your browsing experience. You can change the skin of your Web browser to make it like either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, making it even more versatile.
Instructions
Things You'll Need
PC with Internet access
Download and Install Netscape
Head to the Netscape main page to find the latest version of Netscape (see Resources below).
Click on the button marked 'Free Download.'
Click 'Save As' in the prompt window to continue with the download process.
Click on the link of your Netscape 8.1.2 version after it has downloaded. You can locate this link in the Netscape Download Manager.
Click 'Next.'
Read the Terms and Conditions of Netscape.
Select the 'I Agree' radio button after reading the Terms and Conditions in your window.
Enter your zip code into the designated field.
Click 'Install' to begin the installation process.
Read more: http://goo.gl/0nvTU
A web browser is a piece of software that allows you to access Web sites and navigate between them. Once your browser is set up, you can explore the fascinating world beyond. All web browser are the same in principle. They contain an address box, in which you type a web address, and an area in which web pages are displayed.
Every Web address is unique, in the same way that your telephone number is. It's helpful to think of a web address as a telephone number, whereby you dial the site's address to view it. Web address tells you that the site belongs to the World Wide Web.
Two of the most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you bought your personal computer in 1999 or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer will almost certain have come pre-installed on your system.
Whether or not your personal computer came with its own browser, your internet service provider may also provide you with one in its start up kit. This could be Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but some ISPs, such as AOL and CompuServe, provide you with their own specialty designed Web browser.
You can have more than one Web browser, just as you can have more than one word processor or spreadsheet program. When your internet service provider software first loads, look for a button that says "Internet," "Browse the Internet," or something close to this. When you click on this it will start up your web browser ready to surf the internet.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3010495
By the early 1990s the Internet had been around for decades but remained unavailable to the general public. Simply put, accessing the Internet was expensive, complicated, and not very much fun. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet could now store hypertext pages accessible by browsers on a network. Two programming giants, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first graphics-based web browser Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic was very short lived. Andreessen and others founded Netscape Communications whose flagship software was Netscape Navigator.
This browser became available at the end of 1994. It was originally slated to be free for all non-commercial users. A few months later company policy changed and only
educational and non-profit institutions could use Netscape without charge. Shortly after its release Netscape became very, very popular. One of its special features was the ability to display web pages on the fly. Text and graphics started displaying on the user's computer screen immediately; competitive browsers would only display a page after loading all the graphics. Given the slow connections that were then the norm the difference was striking. Netscape users could work with the downloaded web pages. Users of competitive browsers had to be content staring at a blank screen, perhaps for a few minutes. Small wonder that Netscape was such a big hit.
Netscape worked on a wide variety of computer systems. What's more it looked and worked virtually the same on all of them. This browser also rapidly adopted many technical functions even if they were controversial such as cookies, said to attack personal privacy. Netscape experimented with delivering computer services via the web browser rather than via the operating system. As you might well imagine, Microsoft was unhappy with this perspective. It belatedly entered the browser wars with Internet Explorer, also an offshoot of Mosaic. By 1996 Internet Explorer caught up with Netscape, by 1999 Internet Explorer had clearly won the battle.
Why did Microsoft win? Here are several reasons. Netscape was a small company with a single major product while Microsoft was a giant. Netscape's revenue never equaled the interest paid on Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft had over 90% of the operating system market and had no trouble tying Internet Explorer into the operating system. This meant Windows users had immediate access to IE and many saw no need to download Netscape. Internet Explorer did have some technical advantages such as greater speed. I can't really cry over the Netscape owners, near the end of the millennium America Online purchased the company for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer peaked at about 95% web browser usage. It has since declined sharply while remaining number 1.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1941839
You can display the contents of a folder on your computer in your browser window. Arrange your screen so you can see your Netscape Navigator (or other browser) window and the contents of your hard drive. On a Macintosh double click the hard drive and view by name. On a Windows 95 computer right-click the My Computer shortcut and choose explore.
Click on the plus sign beside the C drive icon to display the contents of that drive. When you have found the folder you want to display, click on the folder icon, hold the mouse button down and drag the folder into the browser window. Release the mouse button and the contents of you folder will be displayed. Click on a document, folder, or image icon to display the selected item. This is especially helpful if you have been saving images from your web surfing sessions. Click on the back button to get back to the Netscape window you were in before displaying the folder.
Source: http://www.internet4classrooms.com/net_tips.htm#netm31598
By the early 1990s the Internet had been around for decades but remained unavailable to the general public. Simply put, accessing the Internet was expensive, complicated, and not very much fun. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet could now store hypertext pages accessible by browsers on a network. Two programming giants, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first graphics-based web browser Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic was very short lived. Andreessen and others founded Netscape Communications whose flagship software was Netscape Navigator.
This browser became available at the end of 1994. It was originally slated to be free for all non-commercial users. A few months later company policy changed and only
educational and non-profit institutions could use Netscape without charge. Shortly after its release Netscape became very, very popular. One of its special features was the ability to display web pages on the fly. Text and graphics started displaying on the user's computer screen immediately; competitive browsers would only display a page after loading all the graphics. Given the slow connections that were then the norm the difference was striking. Netscape users could work with the downloaded web pages. Users of competitive browsers had to be content staring at a blank screen, perhaps for a few minutes. Small wonder that Netscape was such a big hit.
Netscape worked on a wide variety of computer systems. What's more it looked and worked virtually the same on all of them. This browser also rapidly adopted many technical functions even if they were controversial such as cookies, said to attack personal privacy. Netscape experimented with delivering computer services via the web browser rather than via the operating system. As you might well imagine, Microsoft was unhappy with this perspective. It belatedly entered the browser wars with Internet Explorer, also an offshoot of Mosaic. By 1996 Internet Explorer caught up with Netscape, by 1999 Internet Explorer had clearly won the battle.
Why did Microsoft win? Here are several reasons. Netscape was a small company with a single major product while Microsoft was a giant. Netscape's revenue never equaled the interest paid on Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft had over 90% of the operating system market and had no trouble tying Internet Explorer into the operating system. This meant Windows users had immediate access to IE and many saw no need to download Netscape. Internet Explorer did have some technical advantages such as greater speed. I can't really cry over the Netscape owners, near the end of the millennium America Online purchased the company for $4.2 billion. Internet Explorer peaked at about 95% web browser usage. It has since declined sharply while remaining number 1.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1941839
The term "browser wars" is the name given to the competition for dominance in the web browser marketplace. The term is most commonly used to refer to two specific periods of time: the particularly intense struggle between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator during the late 1990s, from 2004 Mozilla came out with Firefox which became a growing threat for IE and eat into its market share, however it was Google's browser Chrome which came later and has today become the dominate browser in the market.
In 1995, the world wide web began to receive a great deal of attention, and netscape navigator was the dominant web browser but microsoft had just launched internet explorer, and included it in windows 95 and by then a browser war had begun. Over the years new versions of both internet explorer and netscape navigator were releasing at a rapid pace. With internet explorer 4, things changed as it offered much more then netscape and was a lot faster. Than internet explorer had dominated the web browser market, while netscape faded out. however things have changed recently as both Firefox and Chrome are the consumers choice today while chrome edges out Firefox as its a lot faster and its market share is growing everyday.
Source: http://goo.gl/Kg7ph
Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) is probably the largest threat that IE has faced in recent times. Currently, according to http://www.w3schools.com, IE is the browser used by 69.9% of Internet users and Firefox is used by 19.1%. This might not seem like much, but according to [http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/] an educated guess at the number of people that use the Internet is somewhere around 605,600,000 users (or was in 2002, the number will have increased substantially by now). That means that (after some erroneous math) a rough stab at guessing the number of people using Firefox is probably over 115,064,000, which isn't a bad user base at all.
When a friend of mine from university first tried to convince me to switch to Firefox I wasn't particularly interested. Basically, IE has done everything that I've wanted in a web browser. He went on at great lengths about the security aspects, the in-built popup blockers, download managers and so on, but I'd spent a fairly large amount of time and money on anti-virus programs, firewalls, spyware removers, and my browser was secure enough. I also have a download manager that I'm very happy with and refuse to change from. After much cajoling I finally agreed to try this newfangled software. I'm glad I did too, because now I have no desire to go back.
Firefox is very easy to install and use. There's nothing complicated, you simply download (for free) and run the install file and then when you run the browser for the first time you get presented with the option of importing your IE favourites (a nice feature, with the click of a button everything is moved across to ease your transition) and also the option of making Firefox your default browser. My initial reaction was fairly apathetic; Firefox seemed pretty much the same as IE and in essence, it is. It has all the basic features of IE, but then I discovered it adds so much more.
The first feature to really grab me is the tabbed browsing. Many alternative browsers and even IE plugins support tabbed browsing (where the new pages can be opened in a tab in the one window, instead of filling the task bar with buttons) but Firefox seems to make it so easy and useful. All you do is click a link with the middle button on your mouse (most newer mice have three buttons, the third often being placed under the scroll wheel) and a new tab opens up containing the page requested. Middle clicking on any tab in the window will close it, without having to actually go to the tab and click close. Ctrl-T will open a new blank tab, and Ctrl-Tab will cycle through them (similar in fashion to Alt-Tab cycling through the open programs). What this all leads to is a much neater Internet experience, with you being able to group certain pages into browser windows, leaving the start bar much cleaner and easier to navigate.
The next feature that caught my attention was the search bar built into the browser. It's small, sleek and simple, built into the right-hand side of the main toolbar beside the address box. You can add many different sites to the search bar and then select the site you wish to search from a drop-down menu. Then it's simply a matter of typing your query in and hitting enter to be taken directly to that page and your search results. This makes searching Ebay, Google, Internet Movie DataBase, Amazon etc. very quick and easy as you can simply type in the desired search criteria as you think of it and get the results back fast. You can get search bar plugins for IE but they tend to take up lots of room, contain ads, and you can usually only have one site per search bar.
Source: http://goo.gl/hqxFC
It's easy to understand why if you know some history about the browser wars. In 1,995 Netscape grew extremely fast and in a very short time gained almost 90% market share waking up the giant Microsoft that started rapid improvements in his own browser making version after version almost every year. Suddenly, once Internet Explorer became the dominant browser, Microsoft stopped new developments.
Although Microsoft Internet Explorer is the dominant browser with more than 85% market share, Firefox is steadily gaining ground because of its many features and greater security. Internet Explorer was designed very fast to take Netscape out of the market, but in the process to add features his security was left behind.
Firefox can help you protect from very serious threats like: viruses, spyware and other malware because it's harder for this malware to get through your browser and get installed in your PC.
Although Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer, all computer users should also have a personal firewall, antivirus software and a spyware cleaner. Also, some knowledge about general security could help minimize your exposure.
Source: http://goo.gl/XY49F
A web browser is a piece of software that allows you to access Web sites and navigate between them. Once your browser is set up, you can explore the fascinating world beyond. All web browser are the same in principle. They contain an address box, in which you type a web address, and an area in which web pages are displayed.
Every Web address is unique, in the same way that your telephone number is. It's helpful to think of a web address as a telephone number, whereby you dial the site's address to view it. Web address tells you that the site belongs to the World Wide Web.
Two of the most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you bought your personal computer in 1999 or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer will almost certain have come pre-installed on your system.
Whether or not your personal computer came with its own browser, your internet service provider may also provide you with one in its start up kit. This could be Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but some ISPs, such as AOL and CompuServe, provide you with their own specialty designed Web browser.
You can have more than one Web browser, just as you can have more than one word processor or spreadsheet program. When your internet service provider software first loads, look for a button that says "Internet," "Browse the Internet," or something close to this. When you click on this it will start up your web browser ready to surf the internet.
Source: http://goo.gl/n7vWC
As the internet was created to unite the world into one inter connecting community, the use of so many different browsers that view Web pages in different ways makes it harder for a Web designer to create a Web site and it can stop users seeing a Web page in the same way. When designing a Web site, the designer must test their pages in different browsers to check the outcome of that page. With so many browsers available, it is important to consider which browsers to test for and how many past browser versions need to be catered for within the designs.
As technology has advanced, the situation has improved to that of a few years ago but the problem has not been completely resolved. You can now be confident that at least 99% of users have browsers that support nearly all of HTML 4. However, there are still inconsistencies in the way Cascading Style Sheets are implemented and older browser versions pre-dating the current standards take a long time to fade away entirely. A Web site designer must now also consider the mobile user; phones, PDAs and other handheld media devices that have access to the internet. The browser that these devices use will be a variant of a standard browser but the user will view the pages on a much smaller screen. A mobile browser, also called a micro browser, mini browser or wireless internet browser (WIB) are optimised so as to display Web content most effectively for small screens on portable devices. Mobile browser software must also be small and efficient to accommodate the low memory capacity and low-bandwidth of wireless handheld devices. Typically, they were stripped-down Web browsers but as of 2006 some mobile browsers can handle latest technologies such as CSS 2.1, JavaScript and Ajax. Jennifer Niederst Robbins (2006) says;
"1996 to 1999: The Browser Wars begin.
For years, the Web development world watched as Netscape and Microsoft battled it out for browser market dominance. The result was a collection of proprietary HTML tags and incompatible implementations of new technologies, such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, and Dynamic HTML. On the positive side, the competition between Netscape and Microsoft also led to the rapid advancement of the medium as a whole."
The World Wide Web consortium establishes the basic rules on how to translate a HTML document and the official HTML standards.
The HTML standards say that the Table tag should support a Cellspacing attribute to define the space between parts of the table. HTML standards don't define the default value for that attribute, so unless you explicitly define Cellspacing when building your page, two browsers may use different amounts of white space in your table. HTML standards are usually ahead of what browsers support. Over the past few years Internet Explorer has done a much better job of this than Netscape Navigator, though Opera has done arguably the best job.
If you build a Web page and the user's browser does not understand part of the language, then they will ignore that part and continue creating the rest of the page. This will cause some browsers not to display the page the way it was designed to be seen.
Source: http://goo.gl/chKBD