It’s still ahead of the game with its incredibly flexible add-ons, tiny programs that other people develop to enhance Firefox with extra features, like a web mail notifier and thumbnails of the sites that show up in a page of search results. )įirefox started life as the modern response to Internet Explorer. (For current browser usage statistics, check out. The following list describes the most popular browsers of today:įigure 1-4. Browser usage statistics, which estimate the percentage of people using each major browser, vary depending on what sites you examine and how you count visitors, but at the time of this writing, this is one reasonable estimate. To make sure your nifty pages don’t turn funky when other people look at them, you should test your site using a variety of browsers, screen sizes, and operating systems. That’s because, when you design your website, you need to prepare for a wide audience of people with different browsers. (You can get the same result by dragging a web page file and dropping it on an already-open browser window.)Īlthough ordinary people need only a single web browser, it’s a good idea for web developers-in-training (like yourself) to become familiar with the most common browsers out there (see Figure 1-4). So if you double-click one of these files, your computer launches your web browser automatically. In fact, your computer already knows that files that end in. Figure 1-3 illustrates the process.įigure 1-3. A web browser is designed to do two things really well: contact remote computers to ask for web pages, and then display those pages on your computer.Īlthough you usually ask your browser to retrieve pages from the Web, you can also use it to view a web page that’s stored on your computer, which is particularly handy when you’re practicing your HTML skills.

The end result is a graphically rich page with different typefaces, colors, and links. Technically, this means the browser converts the plain text it receives from the server into a display document based on formatting instructions embedded in the page. When the browser gets that content, it puts its second skill into action and renders, or draws, the web page. The server heeds these requests and sends back the content of the desired web pages. A server is typically much more powerful than a home computer because it needs to handle multiple browser requests at once. The browser sends that request to a far-off computer called a web server. First, it requests web pages, which happens when you type in a website address (like or click a link in a web page. Without browsers, the Web would still exist, but you wouldn’t be able to look at it.Ī browser’s job is surprisingly simple-in fact, the bulk of its work consists of two tasks. As you no doubt know, a web browser is a program that lets you navigate to and display web pages.

Difference between htm and html