-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 2
Web Browsers
Examples of Web Browsers: IE, Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari
What is a web browser?
You can think of a web browser as a program written by some programmer in some compiled language like C++ or Java. And these web browsers have only one job: to read, interpret, and display languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or even just plain text. So basically when you run your web browser, it just sits there and displays the most recent page of HTML, CSS, Javascript, or text that it has received.
Why don't we look at an example of this?
Anywhere on your computer (maybe on your desktop or something) you can create a file called index.html. Open up that file with a text editor like Sublime Text or Atom and place some text into it! Examples of what you might place into your file:
Hello World!
<h1>Hello World!</p>
Once you have finished putting some text into the index.html file, save your changes. You should then be able to go to your desktop, right click on that file you just created, and select an option that says "Open with Google Chrome". Once you click that option, a window or tab of Google Chrome should pop up and display the text that you have written in your file.
What just happened?
As stated before, your web browser is just a program that displays language such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or plain text. What you did was you created a file (with the file extension .html) and you placed some text into that file, something that Chrome should be able to read and display. You then selected the "Open with Google Chrome" option, which basically fed your file of text into your web browser. If you were able to see your text on Chrome, that means Chrome did what it was supposed to do and displayed your file filled with text. Good job Chrome!
Closing Notes
It's true that web browsers do much more that what was mentioned in this passage. We'll look into other features of web browsers later, but for now it's important to understand that a web browser is nothing more than a program that reads through, interprets, and displays text.