Browser

Browser, software that allows a computer user to find and view information on the Internet. Web browsers interpret the HTML tags in downloaded documents and format the displayed data according to a set of standard style rules.

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When British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he also created the first browser, WorldWideWeb, which became available in 1991 and could also be used to edit Web pages. Web use expanded rapidly after the release in 1993 of Mosaic, which used “point-and-click” graphical manipulations and was the first browser to display both text and images on a single page. The team behind Mosaic created Netscape Navigator, which was optimized for home users browsing at the slow speeds of dial-up modems. Netscape Navigator became the dominant Web browser soon after its release in 1994. BookLink Technologies’s InternetWorks, the first browser with tabs, in which a user could visit another Web site without opening an entirely new window, debuted that same year. Microsoft released its browser Internet Explorer in 1995. Internet Explorer came bundled with the Microsoft Windows operating system and supplanted Netscape Navigator as the dominant browser by the late 1990s.

Apple’s Safari was released in 2003 as the default browser on Macintosh personal computers and later on iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010). Safari 2.0 (2005) was the first browser with a privacy mode, Private Browsing, in which the application would not save Web sites in its history, downloaded files in its cache, or personal information entered on Web pages.

The first serious challenger to Internet Explorer’s dominance was Mozilla’s Firefox, released in 2004 and designed to address issues with speed and security that had plagued Internet Explorer. In 2008 Google launched Chrome, the first browser with isolated tabs, which meant that when one tab crashed, other tabs and the whole browser would still function. By 2013 Chrome had become the dominant browser, surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox in popularity. Microsoft discontinued Internet Explorer and replaced it with Edge in 2015.