We explain what a web browser is and how it differs from a web browser. Also, some examples of this program.
What is a web browser?
It is known as a web browser (or simply browser) or also a web browser (or simply browser) a a computer program that allows the user to access the Web pages of their choice, as long as you know the URL address where it is located (for example: www.google.com) or that you click on a hyperlink that leads to that page.
Web browsers are widely used programs today, since without them you would not be able to surf the internet. Some come pre-installed on our computers (such as Internet Explorer in Windows), while others must be downloaded online (such as Google Chrome) or installed in some other way.
A web browser does nothing more than connect through the Internet to the server where the information we are looking for is located, and request the design and visual assembly instructions that allow it to retrieve the text, images and the ordering of the images. themselves, to compose a web page and show it to us already finished. For it computer codes and protocols such as HTML are used.
But although all browsers fulfill this same function, they do not always do it in the same way, and thus there are more or less fast browsers, endowed with certain characteristics and compatible with one or another Operating System.
Difference between browser and search engine
The difference between these two items of everyday use on the Internet is simple: browsers are programs installed on our computer, which therefore occupy space on your hard drive and in some cases can cost us money, while search engines are online services that help us find the information we want in the vast universe of the Internet.
In other words, we cannot access a search engine, such as Google or Bing, if we do not first have a browser with which to access the Internet. Similarly, having only the search engine would require us to know exactly the URL address of each page that we want to visit, and that could be very complicated. So it is better to learn only the search engine of our preference and use it to get the information we need.
Web browser examples
The most popular and common browsers currently are the following:
- Google Chrome. From the company of the same name, it is an extremely agile browser that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Its appearance revolutionized the world of browsers, forcing the market to make programs lighter and faster.
- Internet Explorer. Designed by Microsoft, it is the browser that comes installed in its versions of Microsoft Windows, although it has been updated in order to remain competitive.
- Mozilla Firefox. Another very popular browser, the first to have a tabbed design that allowed to handle different browsing windows at the same time, was for a time the king of Internet browsers.
- Apple Safari. Safari is the quintessential browser for MacIntosh computers, as well as for smartphones and all Apple products.
- Opera. An extremely simple and fast browser, whose characteristics make it ideal for smartphones and tablets, as it takes up little space and requires few resources.