The Role of Web Browsers

It might surprise you to learn that the Internet, in its most basic form, has been around since 1969 and was used for years as a tool by scientists and within the federal government as a simple way to share text files among computers. The Internet didn't because the Internet that we recognize today until the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and web browsers became commercially available in 1993. That's because the World Wide Web put a graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced "goo-ey") on the Internet, making it much easier to use than the command-line driven Internet. It also made the Internet far more useful, because the Web supports files that contain color, graphics, photos, sounds and video while the pre-Web Internet was simply text-based.

An appropriate analogy is when Microsoft's old text-only, command-line DOS (Disk Operating System) was replaced by early versions of its Windows operating system. Windows 3.1, for example, was really still DOS, but it had an easier-to-use, point-and-click interface.

The GUI for the Internet comes in the form of a software program called a web browser, just like the one you are using now. There are several brands of web browsers available (see Internet Software & Hardware), but Microsoft Internet Explorer is still by far the most-widely used with market share in January 2005 at near the 90-percent mark.

The web browser software is essentially a navigational tool to get around the World Wide Web. You can either type a web address (also called a URL, short for universal resource locator) in the browser's Address Bar, or use the navigational buttons to move from web page to web page.