A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for retrieving, presenting, information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) and may be a web page, image, video or other piece of content[1] Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to navigate their browsers to related resources.
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 Firefox, Internet Explorer/Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari.
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 the 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).[17] 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.
