Mosaic browser

Mosaic was the first graphical interface to the World Wide Web. It was developed for computers running the Unix operating system and later became available for personal computers running the Mac and Windows operating systems.

Mosaic browser was launched in April 1993 and tens thousands of copies were downloaded from NCSA within the first few weeks.

Mosaic was designed to be a Web browser, an application that could load information from a variety of sources (server file directories, text and images for example) into a common interface.

Mosaic not only displays picture and text files internally, it also incorporates a hypertext interface. This means that a Mosaic home page can contain links to other internet sites and information.

The exponential growth of the web was underway in earnests from about fifty websites at the end of 1992, there were more than ten thousand sites by the end of 1994. The Mosaic browser was an important factor in fueling this growth.

By 1995, Microsoft had licensed Mosaic as the basis for its own early browser Internet Explorer, but by that point Netscape Navigator dominated the browser market.
Mosaic browser

What is web browser?

A web browser is the program use to view pages and navigate the world web wide.  It is to connect to web servers, request documents and then properly format and display those documents.

The web browser is the most widespread deployment platform available to developers today: it is installed on very smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop and very other form factor in between.

It is a highly complex program comprising many different functions that are typically implemented in several million lines of source code. Modern browsers are capable of handling dynamic HTML, style sheets, multiple scripting languages, Java applets, Really Syndication (RSS) feeds, FTP connections and more.

A plethora of extensions and plug-ins are available that transform the web browser into a very flexible application.

The webservers will enable the user to follow the hyperlinks on a web page and also to type in a URL for it to follow. It was expected that the browser to have a number of other commands readily available through menus, toolbars, and buttons.
What is web browser?

Web cookies can improve data accuracy

A cookie is a piece of information that is stored by web browser in the user’s; computer, where it waits to be sent back to the server the next time the browser accesses that particular web address.

A cookie is just a simple text file that usually contains a website address and a unique ID.

By returning a cookie to a web server, the browser provides the server a means of associating the current page view with prior page views in order to ‘remember’ something about the previous page request and events.

An e-commerce site might use a cookie to store information about the purchases a user has made in the past.

When the user returns to the site, the site’s software can retrieve the cookie-based data and use the data to create a custom page that contains products similar to those the user has purchased in the past.

Cookie comes in two minor variations: session cookies and persistent cookies.

Session cookies last only as long as the visitor in the site and are deleted after the user closes her web browser or after some period of inactivity.

Persistent cookies last beyond a single visit and have an expiration date sometime in the future.

Cookies are extremely limited in size. Generally, only about 4kb of data can be set in a cookie, meaning they are unacceptable for large values such as documents or mail.

Cookies provide a great service to web measurement application, allowing unique visitors to be tracked from visit to visit and enabling valuable measurements like frequency of visit and lifetime value.
Web cookies can improve data accuracy 

End User Applications: Web Browser

The most important software component for many component users today us the once simple and limited, but now powerful and feature rich, Web browser.

A browser like Microsoft Explorer, Safari or Mozilla Firefox is the key software interface you use to point and click you’re your through the hyperlinked resources of the World Wide Web and the rest of the Internet, as well as corporate intranets and extranets.

Once limited to surfing the Web, browsers are becoming the universal software platform on which end users launch into information searches, E-mail, multimedia file transfer, discussion groups, and many other Internet, intranet, and extranet applications.

Industry experts already predicted that the Web browser would be the model how most people will use networked computer in the future.

So now, whether the people want to watch a video, make a phone call, download some software, hold a video conference, check e-mail or work on a spreadsheet of the team’s business plan, people can use browser to launch and host such applications.

That’s why browsers are being called the universal client, that is, the software component installed in the workstations of all the clients (users) in client/server networks throughout an enterprise.
End User Applications: Web Browser