It is a software application for retrieving, presenting and browsing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI / URL) which can be a web page, image, video, or other content. The Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.
Although browsers are primarily intended to use the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers on private networks or files on file systems.
The most popular web browsers are Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (preceded by Internet Explorer), Safari, Opera, and Firefox.
This process begins when the user enters a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), for example //google.com, in the browser. The prefix of the URL, the uniform resource identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted. The most commonly used type of URL begins with and identifies a resource that will be retrieved through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for file transfer protocol and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot handle directly are often handed over to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are generally passed to the user's default email application and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.
In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. The HTML and associated content (image files, formatting information such as CSS, etc.) are passed to the browser's design engine to convert it from an interactive document to an interactive document, a process known as “rendering”. Apart from HTML, web browsers can generally display any type of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, ya menudo tienen complementos para admitir aplicaciones Flash y applets Java. Al encontrar un archivo de un tipo no admitido o un archivo que está configurado para ser descargado en lugar de mostrarse, el navegador le pide al usuario que guarde el archivo en disco.
