What is a web browser?

A web browser is a software application specifically for the purpose of reading HTML instructions and displaying the resulting Web page. It is a fully functional software that can interpret and display HTML Web pages, applications, JavaScript, AJAX and other content hosted on Web servers. HTML is responsible for telling a Web browser how text and other objects in a Web document should appear. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is define how browsers should request Web pages and how Web servers should respond to those requests.

How to Web Browsers Work ?

A web browser typically reads and renders HTML documents. This happens inside the browser as two stages - the parsing stage and the rendering stage. During the parsing stage, the browser reads the markup in the document, breaks it down into components, and builds a document object model (DOM). When the DOM tree has been constructed, and any CSS style sheets have been loaded and parsed, the browser starts the rendering stage. Each node in the DOM tree will be rendered and displayed in the browser.

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Web Browser - Brief History

The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb and was later renamed as Nexus. After that the world's first popular browser Mosaic innovated by Marc Andreessen in 1993, which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Over the years many other browsers were developed , but Microsoft Internet Explorer , Mozilla Firefox and Google's Chrome continue to dominate todays market

Web Browser HTML Support

All web activity begins on the client side , when a user starts his or her browser. Each browser renders HTML a bit differently such as handles JavaScript, multimedia, style sheets, and other HTML add-ins differently. Web browsers were created specifically for the purpose of reading HTML instructions and displaying the resulting Web page. So When you work with HTML, you need to test your pages on as many different browsers as you can.