A CASE STUDY ON WEB BROWSER OF PC
INTRODUCTION
The World Wide Web has come a long way in its short
existence. Without it, many people wouldn’t know what to do with their day. And
others literally couldn’t survive without it. To browse the internet we use
browser. A browser provides a user interface for displaying and selecting items
from a list of data or from hierarchically organized lists of data such as
directory paths. We can tell that browser is the most commonly used client side
application. Earlier the choice of the browser was limited but this is no
longer the situation now. Numbers of options are available making the choice of
web browser difficult and confusing. Mainstream browsers are getting tough
competition from the upcoming alternatives each one having its own unique
features. Hence making a right choice is a daunting task.
The main reason that motivates us to work on this
project is that nowadays the users just use any browser they get without
knowing its positives and negatives. Our project aims clear the confusion in
user’s mind by systematically testing the browsers and deciding the best choice
for different categories of users. First we discuss about the importance of a
browser and its general architecture. We elaborate our evaluation strategy. We
list and justify our selection of browsers, test environment, parameters and benchmarks.
Gives the details of the tools/scripts developed by us and the test results. Gives
discusses the security issues of the browser. We list out the points of each
browser.
What
is Web Browser?
A web browser is a software application for retrieving,
presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.
An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier
(URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of
content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users
easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also
be defined as an application software or program
designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other
resources on the Internet.
Although browsers are primarily intended to access
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,
Google Chrome, Internet Explorer,
Opera, and Safari The first web browser was invented
in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb
(no spaces) and was later renamed Nexus.
In 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreesen
with the release of Mosaic (later Netscape),
"the world's first popular browser", which made the World Wide Web
system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Andreesen's
browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s.
Microsoft responded with its Internet Explorer
in 1995 (also heavily influenced by Mosaic), initiating the industry's first browser war.
Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer
gained dominance in the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share
peaked at over 95% by 2002.
Opera debuted in 1996; although it has
never achieved widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of
February 2012 according to Net Applications, having grown to 2.14 in April 2011
its Opera-mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting to
1.11 % of overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone
web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also
available on several other embedded systems,
including Nintendo's
Wii
video game console.
Web browser is becoming more and more important as
an application used to conduct billions of dollars of Internet-enabled commerce
each year. Today most of what we use the web for isn’t just web pages, they are
applications. Users upload download videos, chat, play online games, and use
many other web services. Web browser is becoming more and more important as an application
used to conduct billions of dollars of Internet-enabled commerce each year. It
has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years. Web browsers run on
diverse types of hardware, from cell phones and tablet PCs to desktop
computers. Hence a proper design becomes very important. Reference architecture
for web browsers can help implementers to understand trade-offs when designing
new systems, and can assist maintainers in understanding legacy code.
A web browser is client side application program
that contacts remote servers and retrieves documents from it and displays them
on screen, either within the browser window itself or by passing the document
to an external helper application. It allows particular resources to be 3
requested explicitly by URI, or implicitly by following embedded hyperlinks.
Many other features are provided by browser which increases the ease of use.
For example, most browsers keep track of recently visited web pages and provide
a mechanism for “book-marking” pages of interest. They may also store commonly
entered form values as well as usernames and passwords.
Finally, browsers often provide accessibility
features to accommodate users with disabilities such as blindness and low
vision, hearing loss, and motor impairments
Browser Jargon you will come across in this report
Plug-in or Add-on, It consists of a computer program that interacts with a host
application in our case a web browser to provide a certain specific function on
demand . Extension is a program designed to to be incorporated into web browser
to extend the functionality of the later . On its own an extension is
non-functional.
Web browsers are designed to provide a high level of
interoperability between users. Their purpose is to give a common access and
interface to documents from different sources. These can be the information
system of a corporate intranet or a server of the larger Internet. Although
there are many ways of accessing shared information, web browsers are
frequently used as a common way to access it as they most easily meet the
users’ expectations. Standards play an important role in ensuring
interoperability. Browsers are based on standards, most of which regard data
communication, data format, data visualization, and user interface. Users want browsers
to be compatible between them and with standards for several reasons. We will
examine a list of web browser looking for compatibility. The list comprises
some of the most popular web browsers currently available. The list does not
include all browser brands and versions available, but all the considered
browsers are easily available from manufacturers directly on the Internet. Most
browsers exist in multiple versions; we consider either the latest or the most
common version at the time of our analysis. The World Wide Web
is an Internet-based
hypertext
system invented in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser WorldWideWeb,
later renamed Nexus, and released it for the NeXTstep
platform in 1991.
- Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward respectively.
- A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.
- A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is merged with the reload button.
- A home button to return to the user's home page.
- An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it.
- A search bar to input terms into a search engine. In some browsers, the search bar is merged with the address bar.
- A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:
- To know and understand the basic features of web browser.
- To know and understand the Security features of web browser.
- To know and understand the platform support to the web browser.
- To compare the different web browsers.
- To analyse the core features of different web browsers.
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