Browser is an application, which helps us to view the Web sites and the web content.
Web sites are located in some remote systems, which needs a special kind of program or an application to access them, such an application is called browser.
A browser is an application which you can use to retrieve web pages from web sites and view.
When you type a URL in the browser, the browser will convert it into a web request which web server can understand. Browser will send the request to web server using the HTTP protocol.
When a web server returns a web page as a Response, the browser will understand the response and display the body of the response to the user in browser.
In simple terms a browser can be defined as “A software application used to locate and display Web pages”
You can create your own simple browser application using C++, C#, VB.NET or any other language you like. All you need to know is, how to compose a request which web server can understand, how to parse and display the response from web server and communicate with webserver using HTTP protocol.
Even though the basic job of browser is just send requests to web server and receive response from the server, modern browser provide several other enhanced features including Back/Forward buttons, save viewed files to disk so that they can be viewed later, cache images so that the same images need not be downloaded again and again etc.
Internet Explorer, Netspace, Mozilla are some of the popular web browsers currently available in the market.
Netscape was the most popular web browser till 4-5 years back, but currently more than 90% of the internet users use “Internet Explorer” to browse the websites.
