The Broswer: Init()

Which is the software that you spend most of your time on? I should rather say, which application software, since someone could say OS, technically.

I think most people spend a lot of their time on the Browser. The browser is definitely the most important thing on your computer. It helps us to browse the web. It has been about 21 years since the notion of documents linking to one another came up. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the idea of a hyper-text system that would enable scientists, researchers, almost anyone to share research papers in the form of hyper-text documents. The idea was that you can link documents together and also point to any part within the document itself. So instead of downloading the documents on to the computers, using a tool, you could read the document, click the links to go to appropriate diagrams, references etc.

Tim had already played around hyper-text system for his own use, way before in 1980. It was called "Enquire". Tim built a browser called WorldWideWeb(later renamed to Nexus), created a protocol called HTTP and created a SGML based language called HTML. He created these himself and demonstrated the use of hyper-text documents and spoke to interested people on the web about these ideas and encouraged them to implement systems based on HTML.

And from there on the advent of the web begin. Mosaic, Lynx, Spyglass, Netscape, Internet Explorer, the HTML working group, the World Wide Web Consortium, HTML changes, the idea of Cascading Style Sheets propping up, Netscape inducing a scripting environment in the browser and introducing LiveScript that later had its name changed to JavaScript, Microsoft bringing in VBScript as competition, Netscape and Microsoft fighting with each other and the most famous browser-wars only second to star wars, modifications to HTML as they wished and Microsoft introducing the so called DHTML, inconsistencies, standardizations etc..

Three simple things that have changed the way people communicated with each other.

• HTML : The language that would create mark-up and link documents together(http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html)
• HTTP : The simple protocol that would transfer HTML (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html)
• The Browser : The tool that understood both the HTTP protocol and the HTML language elements and aided in retrieving another document over the network when a link was clicked.

Simple. Yet Powerful.
Today, the whole web still stands on these three simple things, but many people have involved in the development of the web, both technical and creative. The huge potential of the web has been realized and truly many fascinating things happen on the internet because of this.

Today there are a large number of browsers that are used world-wide by various communities.

• Google's Chrome
• Mozilla's Firefox
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer
• Apple's Safari
• Opera's Opera

lead the web-browsers in usage.

Many other browsers exist, but these are the notable ones and are basically mature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
We can understand the trend and the usage market by simply querying Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
An understanding how the browser works is a great help for web developers. And it is of course, of interest to me.

The whole idea of web technologies is centered around the two components of the HTTP protocol, the client(the web browser) and the server (the web server). Both have a ton of technologies surrounding around them and so it's a playground for many.
The browser since it is used so heavily and since it differs so widely, owing to history is a place to start studying. But things would only make sense to many if they knew something of all that is involved. Anyhow, if i get it out there, in parts and pieces, may be i could re-organize stuff and make it more interesting and fun!