Intended Audience

This article is written by a software developer for anyone interested in the technical aspects of modern web browsers. Readers do not need any pre-knowledge to understand the content of the article.

Content

1. What is a web browser?
2. Why do we need to know about the working of web browsers?
3. The evolution of web browsers
4. Modern day web browsers

What is a web browser?

A web browser is a piece of (utility) software which lets you browse the Web (aka World Wide Web).
It is really as simple as that.
OR IS IT...? ...Ahh, just kidding! Or am I...? :-P

Okay, let's see what a browser actually is?
This special software has a text field called address bar which is the only opening entrance to the WWW in any browser. In this text field, we write the address of our desired website. Now website address in its raw form is just a plain ip address (which looks like xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). The web browser requests that the webserver (where our website resides) on our behalf retrieve content such as text, images, and multimedia.

This is the simple thousand-level high view of the process. In later parts of the blog, we will cover a closer view of the process.

Why do we need to know about the working of web browsers?

The Internet that we know today has evolved a lot in the last few decades. Our dependency on the Internet also exploded exponentially. There is no question about the benefits of the Internet. It changed the meaning of the information that we perceive today. It brought the world closer. Nurtured human relationships. Due to this humans now have the power to spread any kind of information to the entire globe in a blink of an eye.

The Internet has unlimited potential. To harness this potential, the browser is a powerful and popular tool to access the Internet. Browser is important to everyone irrespective of religion, caste, gender, age, experience/noob, etc. That is why it is extremely important to understand the basics of browsers and how it works technically for more experienced readers.

The evolution of web browsers

Web browsers have a few decades of history, but they have evolved a lot. From only being used by few research people to being used by nearly 5 billion people as of 2020. Browsers have seen a lot, from wars between tech companies like Netscape, Microsoft, Google, and others to take the market share to technical challenges to meet exponentially increasing demand for information and the need for more types of media to serve people.

Here is the tabular timeline compiled to show how browsers have evolved.

Apart from corporate war, which ignited building the superior browsers, increased broadband connectivity also played a vital role in the enhancement of the browsers. Due to which people now have access to data/graphic intensive websites, for example, YouTube streaming was not possible during the era of dial-up modems.

Modern day web browsers

The technology advancement and continuous progress and efforts by different organizations to create the best web browsers led to what we today know as Modern Web Browsers. But one more thing that contributed a lot to the advancement of web browsers is Broadband connections. This gave web browsers the space needed to expand and deliver data-intensive media. This gave birth to 3D animations, live streams, etc.

Key aspects of any modern web browsers are below:

• Web Standards

The initial friction between different browser vendors was because of a lack of common standards. There would be a need for it. The W3C is the best known web standards body.
But there are others such as the WHATWG (who maintain the living standards for the HTML language), ECMA (who publish the standard for ECMAScript, which JavaScript is based on), Khronos (who publish technologies for 3D graphics, such as WebGL), and others.

• Security

When something has such a huge potential and the users are global, the need for security is natural. There are several security measures being implemented by the browsers such as CORS, CSRF, etc.
But many security aspects are provided by the browser but activated or controlled by the server through HTTP headers such as X-Content-Type-Options.

• Speed

In this fast-changing world, no one wants to be left behind. How fast any browser can respond would be an edge over others. The perfect example of it is Google chrome. Due to its speed and reliability only, this wonderful piece of the software remains a dominant browser since its launch even after a decade. Speed of any browser depends on its underlying Javascript Engine.
Here are some example of JS engines used by different browsers.
1. Google Chrome = V8 Engine
2. Edge = Chakra
3. Firefox = SpiderMonkey

• AI Enabled

This is the latest addition to the capability of a browser. Google chrome uses ML/AI to learn a user's browsing pattern and optimizes itself for better results. For example, if you visit a particular website multiple times, Google chrome may learn and load it before you might visit it again.

Links & References

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/The_web_and_web_standards
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Content-Type-Options
3. https://www.bopdesign.com/bop-blog/2012/01/why-use-a-modern-web-browser

About Author

Lakshit Nagar (A full stack enthusiast)

Principle Software Developer

@Oracle India (Ex-ThoughtWorker, IIT Kanpur Alumni)

I love to shape my ideas into a reality. You can find me either working on a project or having a beer with my close friend. :-)

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