Welcome to Common Web Browsers. After watching this video, you will be able to: Identify common web browsers and identify the components of a web browser. A web browser is the software interface that accesses resources on the Internet including text, images, music, video, and online games. As an Internet user, you use a browser to request access to web pages on various websites and it’s the browser’s job to request and retrieve that web-based content stored on a web server, and display that content on web pages in the browser window on your device. You can use a web browser on several different types of devices including desktop PCs, laptops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, game consoles, and even smaller, wearable tech devices such as smart watches. It is estimated that in 2021 just over 5 billion people around the world used some type of web browser. According to statistical information provided by Statcounter Global Stats, as of October 2021, the most commonly used web browsers, according to worldwide market share across all platforms, are: Chrome by Google, which has approximately 65% of the market share, Safari by Apple, which has around 19% market share, Edge by Microsoft, which has just under 4% market share, which is closely followed by Firefox by Mozilla, which has an approximate market share of just over 3.6%, the Samsung Internet browser, which has just under a 3% share, and finally, the Opera browser, which has just over 2.3% share of the web browser market. Apart from these six most popular web browsers, there are several other alternative browsers that you could use instead. This table summarizes which browsers each operating system supports. Note that most web browsers can be used on any platform, but there are cases where the browser can only be used on a restricted set of operating system platforms, such as Apple’s Safari browser, which can only be used on the macOS and iOS operating systems. And similarly, the Samsung Internet browser can only be used on Samsung Galaxy devices running Android 5.0 or later. A typical web browser is made up of various components. The user interface is where the user uses common UI elements such as a search bar and an address bar to enter a Uniform Resource Locator (or URL) to search for content on the web. It includes navigation tools such as Home, Back, Forward and Refresh buttons, along with other features such as History, Bookmarks, and Favorites to visit previously viewed pages or save links to web pages for later reference. The browser engine is the piece of code that is responsible for querying and controlling the rendering engine in the layer below it, based on user interactions coming from the user interface layer above it, such as requests to load the URL and back and forward navigation when browsing. The rendering engine is responsible for presenting (or rendering) the requested web pages and content on your browser screen. Primarily it interprets the HyperText Markup Language (or HTML) code, XML documents, and images and presents them in an easily digestible format on your browser screen. The rendering engine can also display other kinds of data by virtue of plugins or extensions. The Networking component retrieves the entered URLs by using Internet communication protocols; namely HyperText Transfer Protocol (or HTTP) and File Transfer Protocol (or FTP). This component is also responsible for handling a cache of recently retrieved content, which it can re-issue when requested. This reduces network traffic by eliminating the need to constantly retrieve files from a web source that have been previously retrieved and have not changed since that last retrieval instance. The JavaScript interpreter, as the name suggests, interprets and executes any JavaScript code embedded in viewed websites. The interpreted results are directed to the rendering engine to be rendered on your browser screen. The user interface (or UI) backend is responsible for drawing basic widgets, such as windows and combo boxes, by using underlying operating system UI methods to expose a generic interface that is not platform specific or dependent. And lastly, there is the data persistence, or data storage, component, which is essentially a small database located on the local device that stores user data such as cache, session storage, cookies, bookmarks, and user profile preferences. These components work together to give a web browser its core functionality. In this video, you learned that: A web browser is the software interface to access resources on the Internet including text, images, music, video, and online games. You can use a web browser from desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, game consoles, and wearable tech devices such as smart watches. The six most widely used web browsers are Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Samsung Internet, and Opera. Most web browsers can be used on any platform, but some can only be used on a restricted set of operating system platforms. And finally, web browsers consist of several integrated software components.
