What Exactly IS a Web Browser?
What’s the difference between Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google, Yahoo!, and CNN.com? This kind of question seems to puzzle a lot of people, so I’d though I’d go over the basics of how the Web works. To start us off, let’s take a look at Web browsers. Web Browsers A Web browser is a program you run on your computer. Examples would include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome , Safari, and with the advent of Windows 10 , Microsoft Edge. What does a Web browser do? A Web browser’s job is to connect to a server, get an HTML page, and display it for you. If you eyes glazed over a bit when reading that, let’s consider an analogy. Think of your Web browser as a slide projector. Pretend your Web browser is an old-fashioned slide projector. What does a slide projector do? Well, not a whole lot of anything unless you’ve got a slide. You turn it on and it shines a beam of light at the wall. So what do we need? A slide! Our “slide” in the cont...