History of Web browser

CERN’s first web browser was created in 1990, but it was 1991 before it was available on the internet for other organization to use.

World Wide Web developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 at the same time as he wrote the first browser program that allowed user to access web pages throughout the world. He developed the HTTP 0.9 protocol, their browsers soon followed, including Erwise, ViolaWWW, MidasWWW and Cello.

When Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser, the computer he used was a NeXT computer designed by Steve Jobs.

By the end of 1992, several browsers had been created for UNIX computers by CERN and several other European and American universities, and there were about 30 Web serves in the entire world. The year 1992 also saw the released of Lynx, the first text-base browser - the others all utilize graphical user interfaced.

In 1993, Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois, led a team of students that wrote Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, as part of a project for the University’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Although Mosaic was not as sophisticated as its competitors, a lot of effort had gone into making it easy to install.

By end of 1993, the Mosaic browser was available for UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh computers and there were about 200 Web servers in the world. NCSA stopped development of the Mosaic browser in 1996.

These were replaced in later years by Netscape which dominated the browser market until Microsoft developed Internet Explorer. Today, the most popular web browsers to the internet are Mozilla Firefox, Safari by Apple, and Google Chrome.
History of Web browser

Java for World Wide Web

Java was developed in the early 1990s, at Sun Microsystems Labs, by team led by James Gosling. Java has two lives one as a stand-alone computer language for general-purpose programming and the other as a supporting language for internet programming.

Applications programs are stand alone programs that can run on the computer. Java applets are programs that run from a web browser and make the web responsive and interactive.

Java was meant to be used in distributed environment such as internet. Since, both web and Java share the same philosophy, Java could be easily incorporated into the web system.

Before, Java the World Wide Web was limited to the display of still images and tests. However, the incorporation of Java into Web pages has made it capable of supporting animation, graphics, games and a wide range of special effects.

Java also can be found in many places including: web servers, relational databases, mainframe computers, telephones, orbiting telescopes, smartcards.
Java for web browser

E-commerce applications

E-commerce is fundamentally transforming every business - corporations, universities, NGOs, media and government. The emergence of electronic and mobile commerce creates numerous business opportunities and applications.

Electronic commerce, defined as the buying and selling of goods and services and the transfer of funds through digital communications includes a wide variety of applications, such as auctions, banking, marketplaces and exchanges, recruiting and retailing.

There are three types of distinguished e-commerce applications i.e. consumer-to-business application, business-to-business application and intra-organizational application.

New technological development such as web services, web processes and semantics have allowed the creation of a new breed of e-commerce applications which can orchestrate cross organizational and distributed services.

One of the examples of e-commerce applications, home shopping, is already in wide used and has generated substantial revenues for many companies ruining e-mails or e-store.

These stores/malls enable a customer to enter on-line stores look at products, try on computerized clothes, see a reflection in the digital mirror and purchase with overnight delivery against credit card billing.
E-commerce applications

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 web browser enables a user to interact with websites through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is a software program used to retrieve and display webpages and to navigate them.

With the development of browser technology, a number of features were added to HTML, primarily related to rich content presentation and user interaction, such as the use of client side scripting using JavaScript.

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.

There are many browsers on the market now, most of them currently available for download from internet.
End User Applications: Web Browser