What is a Browser?

What is a Browser?

If you use Microsoft Windows (Windows 7, Vista, or XP), you probably know the browser as the “little blue e on the desktop” (shown in Figure 1), commonly called Internet Explorer. A large number of people don’t stray beyond using this program for the purposes of viewing web pages—for many, Internet Explorer is the Internet.

Figure 1. Internet Explorer—the “little blue e on the desktop”

Internet Explorer (or IE, as we’ll refer to it from now on) is the most commonly used browser, largely because Microsoft included it as part of the Windows operating system as far back as Windows 95. As it’s the first browser that many people use, they tend to stick with it because it’s familiar.

However, there are other browsers that you can use instead of IE. Still riding a wave of popularity is Firefox, an alternative browser with a number of attractive features not available in IE (at the time of writing). It also handles the features of some web pages better than IE. Since the second edition of this book, another browser has been released and become very popular in a short space of time—Chrome, by some company called Google (of which you may have heard). Both Firefox and Chrome are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems; IE, however, is only available for Windows operating systems.

The screenshots you’ll see in this book were taken using Firefox on Windows 7, unless stated otherwise. Because of the cross-platform nature of Firefox and the excellent standards support, I recommend that you download a copy of Firefox for the purposes of working through the exercises in this book.

You might like to try another browser, other than Firefox or Chrome, that supports web standards (a topic we’ll cover very soon). For Windows users, Opera’s web browser offers excellent standards support and a unique set of features; it also has a very loyal following and, like Firefox, can be freely downloaded. Mac users can also use the Opera browser, or simply stick with the Apple browser that’s installed by default, Safari, which again offers excellent support for web standards. A selection of Mac browser icons appears in Figure 2.

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