Internet history timeline

Early research and development:

1961 First packet-switchingpapers 1966 Merit Network founded 1966 ARPANET planning starts 1969 ARPANET carries its first packets 1970 Mark I network at NPL (UK) 1970 Network Information Center (NIC) 1971 Merit Network's packet-switched network operational 1971 Tymnet packet-switched network 1972 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established 1973 CYCLADES network demonstrated 1974 Telenet packet-switched network 1976 X.25 protocol approved 1978 Minitel introduced 1979 Internet Activities Board(IAB) 1980 USENET news usingUUCP 1980 Ethernet standard introduced 1981 BITNET established

Merging the networks and creating the Internet:

1981 Computer Science Network (CSNET) 1982 TCP/IP protocol suite formalized

1982 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) 1983 Domain Name System(DNS) 1983 MILNET split off fromARPANET 1985 First .COM domain name registered 1986 NSFNET with 56 kbit/s links 1986 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 1987 UUNET founded 1988 NSFNET upgraded to 1.5 Mbit/s (T1) 1988 OSI Reference Modelreleased 1988 Morris worm 1989 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) 1989 PSINet founded, allows commercial traffic 1989 Federal Internet Exchanges (FIXes) 1990 GOSIP (without TCP/IP) 1990 ARPANETdecommissioned 1990 Advanced Network and Services (ANS) 1990 UUNET/Alternet allows commercial traffic 1990 Archie search engine 1991 Wide area information server (WAIS) 1991 Gopher 1991 Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) 1991 ANS CO+RE allows commercial traffic

1991 World Wide Web(WWW) 1992 NSFNET upgraded to 45 Mbit/s (T3) 1992 Internet Society (ISOC) established 1993 Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) 1993 InterNIC established 1993 Mosaic web browserreleased 1994 Full text web search engines 1994 North American Network Operators' Group(NANOG) established

Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet:

1995 New Internet architecture with commercialISPs connected at NAPs 1995 NSFNETdecommissioned 1995 GOSIP updated to allowTCP/IP 1995 very high-speed Backbone Network Service(vBNS) 1995 IPv6 proposed 1998 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) 1999 IEEE 802.11b wireless networking 1999 Internet2/Abilene Network 1999 vBNS+ allows broader access 2000 Dot-com bubble bursts 2001 New top-level domain names activated 2001 Code Red I, Code Red II, and Nimda worms 2003 National LambdaRailfounded

2006 First meeting of the Internet Governance Forum 2010 First internationalized country code top-level domainsregistered 2012 ICANN begins accepting applications for new generic top-level domain names

Examples of popular Internet services:

1990 IMDb Internet movie database 1995 Amazon.com online retailer 1995 eBay online auction and shopping 1995 Craigslist classified advertisements 1996 Hotmail free web-based e-mail 1997 Babel Fish automatic translation 1998 Google Search 1998 Yahoo! Clubs (now Yahoo! Groups) 1998 PayPal Internet payment system 1999 Napster peer-to-peer file sharing 2001 BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing 2001 Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2003 LinkedIn business networking 2003 Myspace social networking site 2003 Skype Internet voice calls 2003 iTunes Store 2003 4Chan Anonymous image-based bulletin board 2004 Facebook social networking site

2004 Podcast media file series 2004 Flickr image hosting 2005 YouTube video sharing 2005 Google Earth virtual globe 2006 Twitter microblogging 2007 WikiLeaks anonymous news and information leaks 2007 Google Street View 2008 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) 2008 Dropbox cloud-based file hosting 2009 Bing search engine 2011 Google+ social networking

Further information: Timeline of popular Internet services

What is the Internet ?

The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that use the TCP/IP set of network protocols to reach billions of users. The Internet began as a U.S Department of Defense network to link scientists and university professors around the worold.

A network of networks, today, the Internet serves as a global data communications system that links millions of private, public, academic and business networks via an international telecomunications backbone that consists of various electronic and optical networking technologies.

Decentralized by design, no one owns the Internet and it has no central governing authority. As a creation of the Defense Department for sharing research data, this lack of centralization was intentional to make it less vulnerable to wartime or terrorist attacks.

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangebly, however, the internet and World Wide Web are not one and the same.

The Internet is a vast hardware and software infrastructure that enables computer interconnectivity. The Web, on the other hand, is a massive hypermedia database, a myriad collection of documents and other resources interconnected by hyperlinks. Imagine the World Wide Web as the platform which allows one to navigate the Internet with the use of a browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

Follow the Internet Timeline below to see how the Internet has evolved over the years and take a glance at what lies ahead in the future as the Internet continues to change the world we live in.

Internet Timeline
1957 USSR launches Sputnik into space. In response, the USA creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA ) with the mission of becoming the leading force in science and new technologies.

1962 J.C.R. Licklider of MIT proposes the concept of a Galactic Network. For the first time ideas about a global network of computers are introduced. J.C.R. Licklider is later chosen to head ARPA's research efforts.

1962 - Paul Baran, a member of the RAND Corporation, determines a way for the Air Force to control bombers and missiles in case of a nuclear event. His results call for a decentralized network comprised of packet switches.

1968 - ARPA contracts out work to BBN. BBN is called upon to build the first switch.

1969 ARPANET created - BBN creates the first switched network by linking four different nodes in California and Utah; one at the University of Utah, one at the University of California at Santa Barbara, one at Stanford and one at the University of California at Los Angeles.

1972 - Ray Tomlinson working for BBN creates the first program devoted to email.

1972 - ARPA officially changes its name to DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

1972 - Network Control Protocol is introduced to allow computers running on the same network to communicate with each other.

1973 - Vinton Cerf working from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA begin work developing TCP/IP to allow computers on different networks to communicate with each other.

1974 - Kahn and Cerf refer to the system as the Internet for the first time.

1976 - Ethernet is developed by Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe.

1976 SATNET, a satellite program is developed to link the United States and Europe. Satellites are owned by a consortium of nations, therby expanding the reach of the Internet beyond the USA.

1976 Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, sends out an email on 26 March from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern.

1976 - AT& T Bell Labs develops UUCP and UNIX.

1979 - USENET, the first news group network is developed by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis and Steve Bellovin.

1979 - IBM introduces BITNET to work on emails and listserv systems.

1981 - The National Science Foundation releases CSNET 56 to allow computers to network without being connected to the government networks.

1983 - Internet Activities Board released.

1983 - TCP/IP becomes the standard for internet protocol.

1983 - Domain Name System introduced to allow domain names to automatically be assigned an IP number.

1984 - MCI creates T1 lines to allow for faster transportation of information over the internet.

1984- The number of Hosts breaks 1,000

1985- 100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on the Canadina Pacific Railway, the last Canadian university was connected to NetNorth in a one year effort to have coast-to-coast connectivity

1987 - The new network CREN forms.

1987- The number of hosts breaks 10,000

1988 - Traffic rises and plans are to find a new replacement for the T1 lines.

1989- The Number of hosts breaks 100 000

1989- Arpanet ceases to exist

1990 - Advanced Network & Services (ANS) forms to research new ways to make internet speeds even faster. The group develops the T3 line and installs in on a number of networks.

1990 - A hypertext system is created and implemented by Tim Berners-Lee while working for CERN.

1990- The first search engine is created by Mcgill Univeristy, called the Archie Search Engine

1991- U.S greenlight for commerical enterprise to take place on the Internet

1991 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) creates the National Research and Education Network (NREN).

1991 - CERN releases the World Wide Web publicly on August 6th, 1991

1992 The Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered

1992- Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000

1993 - InterNIC released to provide general services, a database and internet directory.

1993- The first web browser, Mosaic (created by NCSA), is released. Mosaic later becomes the Netscape browser which was the most popular browser in the mid 1990's.

1994 - New networks added frequently.

1994 - First internet ordering system created by Pizza Hut.

1994 - First internet bank opened: First Virtual.

1995 - NSF contracts out their access to four internet providers.

1995 - NSF sells domains for a $50 annual fee.

1995 Netscape goes public with 3rd largest ever Nasdaq ipo share value

1995- Registration of domains is no longer free.

1996- The WWW browser wars are waged mainly between Microsoft and Netscape. New versions are released quarterly with the aid of internet users eager to test new (beta) versions.

1996 Internet2 project is initiated by 34 universities

1996 - Internet Service Providers begin appearing such as Sprint and MCI.

1996 - Nokia releases first cell phone with internet access.

1997- (Arin) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers, now handled by Network Solutions (IinterNic)

1998- Netscape releases source code for Navigator.

1998-Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) created to be able to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks

1999 - A wireless technology called 802.11b, more commonly referred to as Wi-Fi, is standardized.

2000- The dot com bubble bursts, numerically, on March 10, 2000, when the technology heavy NASDAQ composite index peaked at 5,048.62

2001 - Blackberry releases first internet cell phone in the United States.

2001 The spread of P2P file sharing across the Internet

2002 -Internet2 now has 200 university, 60 corporate and 40 affiliate members

2003- The French Ministry of Culture bans the use of the word "e-mail" by government ministries, and adopts the use of the more French sounding "courriel"

2004 The Term Web 2.0 rises in popularity when O'Reilly and MediaLive host the first Web 2.0 conference.

2004- Mydoom, the fastest ever spreading email computer worm is released. Estimated 1 in 12 emails are infected.

2005- Estonia offers Internet Voting nationally for local elections

2005-Youtube launches

2006- There are an esitmated 92 million websites online

2006 Zimbabwe's internet access is almost completely cut off after international satellite communications provider Intelsat cuts service for non-payment

2006- Internet2 announced a partnership with Level 3 Communications to launch a brand new nationwide network, boosting its capacity from 10Gbps to 100Gbps

2007- Internet2 officially retires Abilene and now refers to its new, higher capacity network as the Internet2 Network

2008- Google index reaches 1 Trillion URLs

2008 NASA successfully tests the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Using software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, dozens of space images are transmitted to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about more than 32 million kilometers from Earth

2009 ICANN gains autonomy from the U.S government

2010- Facebook announces in Februrary that it has 400 million active users.

2010 The U.S House of Representatives passes the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (H.R. 4061)

The Future: Internet2 and Next Generation Networks

The public Internet was not initially designed to handle massive quantities of data flowing through millions of networks. In response to this problem, experimental national research networks (NRN's), such as Internet2 and NGI (Next Generation Internet), are developing high speed, next generation networks.

In the United States, Internet2 is the foremost non for profit advanced networking consortium led by over 200 universities in cooperation with 70 leading corporations, 50 international partners and 45 non profit and government agencies. The Internet2 community is actively engaged in developing and testing new network technologies that are critical to the future progress of the Internet.

Internet2 operates the Internet2 Network, a next-generation hybrid optical and packet network that furnishes a 100Gbps network backbone, providing the U.S research and education community with a nationwide dynamic, robust and cost effective network that satistfies their bandwith intensive requirements. Although this private network does not replace the Internet, it does provide an environment in which cutting edge technologies can be developed that may eventually migrate to the public Internet.

Internet2 research groups are developing and implementing new technolgies such as Ipv6, multicasting and quality of service (QoS) that will enable revolutionary Internet applications.

New quality of service (QoS) technologies, for instance, would allow the Internet to provide different levels of service, depending on the type of data being transmitted. Different types of data packets could recieve different levels of priority as they travel over a network. For example, packets for an application such as videoconferencing, which require simulatneous delivery, would be assigned higher priority than e-mail messages. However, advocates of net neutrality argue that data discrimination could lead to a tiered service model being imposed on the Internet by telecom companies that would undermine Internet freedoms.

More than just a faster web, these new technologies will enable completely new advanced applications for distributed computation, digital libraries, virtual laboratories, distance learning and tele-immersion.

As next generation Internet development continues to push the boundries of what's possible, the existing Internet is also being enhanced to provide higher transmission speeds, increased security and different levels of service.

How To Use The Internet

This RFC is being distributed... to make available some "hints" which will allow new network participants to understand how the direction of the Internet is set, how to acquire online information and how to be a good Internet neighbor... Distribution of this memo is unlimited. - E. Krol, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet, September 1989.

The Internet is a complex space with a rich set of useful features and functions. Knowing how to get the most out of the Internet can help you as much as knowing how to read, maybe more. Each of the individual Internet application chapters includes a section on how to use the technology, listed below for convenience and ordered by year of creation.

Technology How To Use The Internet How To Use Email How To Use Mailing Lists

Invented 1969 1971 1972

How To Use MUD's How To Use The Usenet How To Use IRC How To Use The Web

1979 1980 1988 1990

Internet Use
This RFC is being distributed... to make available some "hints" which will allow new network participants to understand how the direction of the Internet is set, how to acquire online information and how to be a good Internet neighbor... Distribution of this memo is unlimited. - E. Krol, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet, September 1989.

The Internet can powerfully extend your ability to find, manage, and share information. The following sections provide references to client application software, and descriptions of the main features and capabilities of each Internet application:

How To Use The Internet How To Use The Web

o

Web Browsers

Web Browser Applications Recommended Web Browser Configuration Optional Web Browser Configuration

Surf The Web

Web Navigation Web Page Bookmarks / Favorites Web Pages With Frames Web Browser Keyboard Commands

Find Web Sites

Directory Sites Search Engines Specialized Search Engines

Searching

The Logic Of Boolean Algebra Search For Unique Identifiers Use AND To Combine Search Words Search For Phrases Refine A Search With Related Keywords Questions And Answer Searches Add Search Filters With OR Use NOT To Exclude Keywords Search For Wildcards Comparison Test Search Engines More Web Search Information

Search Engines

AltaVista Excite Google Go.com HotBot Lycos

Yahoo

How To Use Usenet Newsgroups

o o o o o o o o o o

Client Applications Finding Newsgroups Newsgroup Descriptions Reading Threads Posting Replying Test Groups Answer Groups Archives

How To Use Email

o o o o o o o o o o o

Email Client Applications Email Program Configuration Email Addressing Email Subjects Email Composition Sending Email Reading Email Replying To Email Forwarding Email Saving Email Deleting Email

How To Use IRC

o

Client Applications

o o o o o o o o o

Finding Servers Configuration Finding Channels Nicknames List Command Join & Leave Commands Talking Who Command Chatiquette

How To Use A MUD

o

MUD Client Applications

Windows MUD Clients Macintosh MUD Clients Unix MUD Clients Other MUD Clients

o o o o

How To Find A MUD Sign On To A MUD MUD Commands Mudiquette - MUD Etiquette

How To Use Mailing List's

o o o o o o

Finding Lists Subscribe Unsubscribe Sending Replying Digests

o o o o o

Web Interfaces Mailing List Etiquette Listproc Use Listserv Use Majordomo Use.

Web Browser Applications There are three leading web browser applications, and several other options. Dozens of browsers have been created over the years, many of which are described in the section on browser history. Today, most people use one of the mainstream browsers: Explorer or FireFox. Some people run more than one browser, but you can conveniently keep all of your bookmarks only in one. Also, links only get marked as visited in the browser you use, so you probably want to standardize on one browser for most of your surfing. A high-level trade-off matrix between the top three browsers is shown below. You can also ask your friends for their experiences, and download and try several browsers.

Pro Internet Explorer Integrated with OS, faster. More sites ensure IE compliant first, some use MS multi-media software. Open source. Mozilla FireFox * Good bookmark functionality. Multi-platform. Available email (Thunderbird), newsgroups, and IRC clients.

Con Integrated with OS, more vulnerable to viruses. More complex, deeper menus, not always standard. Not quite as fast for some functions on Windows. Less widely used on Windows.

This Living Internet site recommends Mozilla Firefox because it is well coded, multi-platform, free open source software, compliant with web standards, and has the best bookmarking and tabbed viewing functionality. Mozilla also has developed a suite of basic Internet applications, including an email program and newsgroup reader called Thunderbird, and an associated ChatZilla IRC client. These open source applications perform well on all platforms, and get better with eachrelease. Other browsers. There are several other web browsers which compete on various feature sets and have different strengths:

Lynx -- A venerable web browser for character mode terminals without graphics originally developed at the University of Kansas Academic Computer Services Distributed Computing Group. NeoPlanet -- Integrates several Internet applications together, including a browser, email, and chat. Opera -- Small, fast, customizable application.

Indexes:

Open Directory - Web Browsers Yahoo - Browsers

Resources. The following sites maintain statistics about web browsers:

Open Directory - Web Counters and Trackers Yahoo - Browser Statistics Browser News - Statistics Browser Statistics - Trackers Compared EWS Browser Statistics TheCounter.com Browser Statistics W3Schools Browser Statistics WebReference.com Browser Statistics Yahoo - The Random Yahoo Link -- historical.

You can also see the section on Web Statistics.

Other browser sites are listed below:

AnyBrowser Campaign Evolt.org Browser Archive Netscape Archive SillyDog Netscape Browser Archive Web Browsers OpenFAQ.

Recommended Web Browser Configuration You should optimize your fonts, ensure the URL is always displayed, set your favorite home page, and reload pages only once a session, all basic web browser configurations recommended for most surfers:

Fonts. Set the fonts large enough to be seen easily, generally at least point size 12. There are often two settings, one for normal text, and one for oldfashioned typewriter type text that needs each character to take the same amount of space. Set the normal text -- perhaps called "Web page font", "Proportional", or "Variable width font" -- to a modern font like "Arial" or "Times New Roman". Set the typewriter style text -- perhaps called "Plain text font", "Fixed width font", or "Monospace" -- to "Courier New" or if not available then plain "Courier".

Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / General / Fonts Firefox: Tools / Options / General / Fonts & Colors.

URL display. Set the browser to display the site's URL in the top border, so that you can always see the full address of any page you visit.

Explorer: View / Toolbars / Address Bar Firefox: Right-click on File / Edit bar at the top of window, select "Navigation Toolbar".

Set home page. Set your home page to the Internet site you wish displayed when your browser starts. You can set your home page to your own home page, a search engine site, or a favorite subject page like a sports or gardening site. If you want your first page to start quickly, you should specify a simple page with fewer graphics, or no page at all.

Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / General / Home page Firefox: Tools / Options / General / Home page

Page reloading. Set your browser to use a copy of a web page in your computer's cache if it is not older than the maximum age specified by the server. Typically a browser will use a cached page throughout one browser session, unless the page is marked with HTML that specifies it be reloaded with some other frequency, such as every time, after one hour, after 24 hours, etc. This can speed up your surfing since it saves the time of reloading the page when it hasn't changed.

Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / General / Temporary Internet Files / Settings / Every time you start Internet Explorer Firefox: Automatic setting. Optional Web Browser Configuration Optimizing your cache, maximizing screen real estate, and maintaining a history file should improve browsing performance and usability for most users:

Using a cache. You can specify how much of your local hard disk to put aside to temporarily store the web pages you visit. As described in the previous pages, if you visit a site more than once in the same session, the page can be retrieved quickly from your local drive instead of over the Internet. In general you can set aside as much disk space as you wish, although a rule of thumb is no more than 10 MB is needed and no more than 10% of your available space should be spared.

Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / Temporary Internet files / Settings Firefox: Tools / Options / Privacy / Cache You can also clear your cache to ensure that every page you visit will be loaded fresh across the network. If you are having trouble updating a page this sometimes helps ensure you get a clean reload.

Optimize toolbars. The following configurations help maximize your window size:

Explorer: View / Toolbars - Turn on only "Standard Buttons" and Address Bar" View / Status Bar

- Turn on View / Explorer Bar - Turn off all options. Firefox: Right-click on top File / Edit bar, select Customize, then Show: Icons.

Maintain history file. You should set a maximum amount of time for keeping pages in your history file, which also records the links you've visited so that they can then be set in a darker colour. If you set links in your history file to be deleted after a certain number of days, then you will have no way of knowing if you've already visited them, and may click on them again by mistake.

Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / General / History - Set "Days to keep pages in history" to maximum, generally 99. Firefox: Tools / Options / Privacy / History - Set "Remember visited pages for the last ... days" to 987654321.

Web browser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Usage share of web browsersaccording to StatCounter.

Internet

An Opte Project visualization of routing pathsthrough a portion of the Internet.

General[show]

Governance[show]

Information infrastructure[show]

Services[show]

Guides[show]

Internet portal

A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on theWorld Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video or other piece of content.[1] Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as anapplication software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.

Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems. The major web browsers are Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.[2]
Contents
[hide]

1 History 2 Function 3 Features

o o
security

3.1 User interface 3.2 Privacy and

o
support

3.3 Standards

3.4 Extensibility 4 See also 5 References

6 External links

[edit]History Main article: History of the web browser The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb (no spaces) and was later renamed Nexus.[3]

Marc Andreessen inventor of Netscape

In 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreessen with the release of Mosaic (later Netscape), "the world's first popular browser",[4] which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Andreesen's browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s.[4] The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 one of the first graphical web browsers led to an explosion in web use. Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, soon started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influencedNetscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak (see usage share of web browsers). Microsoft responded with its Internet Explorer in 1995, also heavily influenced by Mosaic, initiating the industry's first browser war. Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer gained dominance in the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.[5]

WorldWideWeb for NeXT, released in 1991, was the first web browser.[6]

Opera debuted in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net Applications.[7] Its Opera-mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting to 1.1% of overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being

preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console. In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7% of browser use.[5] As of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.[7] Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of April 2011, it had a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 7% of the entire browser market.[7] The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Chrome, first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased significantly year on year, by doubling its usage share from 8% to 16% by August 2011. This increase seems largely to be at the expense of Internet Explorer, whose share has tended to decrease from month to month.
[8]

In December 2011, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser but still has lower

usage than all versions of Internet Explorer combined.[9] [edit]Function The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user ("retrieval" or "fetching"), allowing them to view the information ("display", "rendering"), and then access other information ("navigation", "following links"). This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URL, the Uniform Resource Identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be Retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[10] Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader. In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been Retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML and associated content (image files, formatting information such as CSS, etc.) is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document, a process known as "rendering". Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again. [edit]Features For more details on this topic, see Comparison of web browsers. Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".[11][12][13] All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.[14][15][16][17] Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed.[18] In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.[19] Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features. [edit]User

interface

Some home media devices now include web browsers, like this LG Smart TV. The browser is controlled using an on-screen keyboard and LG's "Magic Motion" remote.

Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:[20]

Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward respectively.

A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource. A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is merged with the reload button.

A home button to return to the user's home page. An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it. A search bar to input terms into a search engine. In some browsers, the search bar is merged with the address bar.

A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.

Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page. [edit]Privacy

and security

Main article: Browser security Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, cookies, and browsing history. For a comparison of the current security vulnerabilities of browsers, see comparison of web browsers. [edit]Standards

support

Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with interoperability. Modern web browsers support a combination of standards-based and de facto HTML and XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers. [edit]Extensibility A browser extension is a computer program that extends the functionality of a web browser. Every major web browser supports the development of browser extensions.