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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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