Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The protocol is therefore also referred to as HTTP over TLS, or HTTP over SSL.
A web browser is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people have used a browser. The most-used browser is Google Chrome, with a 64% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 19%.
A favicon, also known as a shortcut icon, website icon, tab icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one or more small icons associated with a particular website or web page. A web designer can create such an icon and upload it to a website by several means, and graphical web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page's favicon in the browser's address bar and next to the page's name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title on the tab, and site-specific browsers use the favicon as a desktop icon.
The Book of Mozilla is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Waterfox and Firefox series of web browsers. It is viewed by directing the browser to about:mozilla.
A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war," (1995–2001) consisted of Internet Explorer and Navigator. Browser wars continued with the decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the popularity of other browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Opera.
In computing, the User-Agent header is an HTTP header intended to identify the user agent responsible for making a given HTTP request. Whereas the character sequence User-Agent comprises the name of the header itself, the header value that a given user agent uses to identify itself is colloquially known as its user agent string. The user agent for the operator of a computer used to access the Web has encoded within the rules that govern its behavior the knowledge of how to negotiate its half of a request-response transaction; the user agent thus plays the role of the client in a client–server system. Often considered useful in networks is the ability to identify and distinguish the software facilitating a network session. For this reason, the User-Agent HTTP header exists to identify the client software to the responding server.
MHTML, an initialism of "MIME encapsulation of aggregate HTML documents", is a Web archive file format used to combine, in a single computer file, the HTML code and its companion resources that are represented by external hyperlinks in the web page's HTML code. The content of an MHTML file is encoded using the same techniques that were first developed for HTML email messages, using the MIME content type multipart/related. MHTML files use an .mhtml or .mht filename extension.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
Netscape Browser is the eighth major release of the Netscape series of web browsers, now all discontinued. It was published by AOL, but developed by Mercurial Communications, and originally released for Windows on May 19, 2005.
The blink element is a non-standard HTML element that indicates to a user agent that the page author intends the content of the element to blink. The element was introduced in Netscape Navigator but is no longer supported and often ignored by modern Web browsers; some, such as Internet Explorer, never supported the element at all.
Digest access authentication is one of the agreed-upon methods a web server can use to negotiate credentials, such as username or password, with a user's web browser. This can be used to confirm the identity of a user before sending sensitive information, such as online banking transaction history. It applies a hash function to the username and password before sending them over the network. In contrast, basic access authentication uses the easily reversible Base64 encoding instead of hashing, making it non-secure unless used in conjunction with TLS.
Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a deprecated application programming interface (API) for web browser plugins, initially developed for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 and subsequently adopted by other browsers.
A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance.
This is a timeline of web browsers from 1990 to the present. Prior to browsers, many technologies and systems existed for information viewing and transmission. For an in-depth history of earlier web browsers, see the web browser article.
In the context of the World Wide Web, a bookmark is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that is stored for later retrieval in any of various storage formats. All modern web browsers include bookmark features. Bookmarks are called favorites or Internet shortcuts in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, and by virtue of that browser's large market share, these terms have been synonymous with bookmark since the First Browser War. Bookmarks are normally accessed through a menu in the user's web browser, and folders are commonly used for organization. In addition to bookmarking methods within most browsers, many external applications offer bookmarks management.
Web typography, like typography generally, is the design of pages – their layout and typeface choices. Unlike traditional print-based typography, pages intended for display on the World Wide Web have additional technical challenges and – given its ability to change the presentation dynamically – additional opportunities. Early web page designs were very simple due to technology limitations; modern designs use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and other techniques to deliver the typographer's and the client's vision.
The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format for use in web pages. WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added. The two primary goals are first to distinguish font files intended for use as web fonts from fonts files intended for use in desktop applications via local installation, and second to reduce web font latency when fonts are transferred from a server to a client over a network connection.
WebSocket is a computer communications protocol, providing simultaneous two-way communication channels over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection. The WebSocket protocol was standardized by the IETF as RFC 6455 in 2011. The current specification allowing web applications to use this protocol is known as WebSockets. It is a living standard maintained by the WHATWG and a successor to The WebSocket API from the W3C.
The view-source URI scheme is used by some web browsers to construct URIs that result in the browser displaying the source code of a web page or other web resource.
