Web Browser

The most popular activity of Computer Science student is surfing the Internet. Internet is very important and close to our life nowadays. You can find everything in the Internet such as images, music or information. You will agree with me that the Internet is very useful but the first thing you do before you surf the Internet is opening the web browser. Web browser is a software application that allows user to display and interact with texts, images or videos on the Web page. It allows you to surf the Internet. In the present, there are many web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari.

The first example is Internet Explorer. This one is the most widely used web browser because it comes with Microsoft Windows. The first version of Internet Explorer was released on August 1995 with Windows 95 and the current version is Internet Explorer version 7.0. In this version, there are many features, for example, tabbed browsing which is a popular feature for web browsers competitor. Another example of feature is quick tabs. It will display a thumbnail preview of opened tabs and it can rearrange tabs by dragging and dropping them and also they improved the graphic user interface of this version too.

Another example is Mozilla Firefox. This one is a free and open source web browser and the second most popular web browser after Internet Explorer. It used to be named Phoenix but it is the same as Phoenix Technologies, so they changed it to Firebird and again it is the same as Firebird free database software project. Therefore, they changed it to Mozilla Firebird but it is still confusing with the database software name. Finally, they changed it from Mozilla Firebird to Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox has many features such as tabbed browsing, spell checker and search engine. Mozilla Firefox can run on every operating system, such as, Microsoft Windows, Mac and Linux.

The final example is Safari. This web browser was developed by Apple and released on January 2003 for Mac OS. Later, it can be used in Microsoft Windows and other Apple product, such as, iPhone and iPod Touch. The features in Safari are quite similar to other web browser, such as, Tabbed Browsing, Pop-up ad blocking, Text search, spell checking and web-search box in the toolbar Google on Mac and either Google or Yahoo! on Microsoft Windows.

I do not care too much about web browser and I do not like to use tabbed browsing. I use Internet Explorer version 6.0 because I used Windows so I do not need to find other web browsers. Most of my friends use Firefox because it has add-on tools but in my opinion, it is meaningless because I just want it open the Web page without any error. That is enough for my Internet surfing.