Web Browser Overview

Web browsers allow us to see websites and web pages, but what does that look like, and how many options are out there?

The Client Server Relationship

Imagine you go to a restaurant and it's a sit-down restaurant, and somebody comes to your table and you order from that person. That person is there to give you service. They are the waiter or waitress that's providing services for you. You are the client, or the customer. That's exactly the same thing when it comes to computers and networking: you have a client, some sort of machine that is requiring services, and then you've got a server that's providing those services.

It's the same thing when it comes to websites. What we have on our client machine is some sort of app, and that app is going to retrieve web pages for us, or at least display those web pages to us. Then we have a service over here. The app is what's called a browser. The browser allows us to view websites and web pages and be able to display them on our screen. The service over here could be something like IIS or Apache, and those are providing those services to us. They're delivering the websites to us, and then we are actually seeing that on our machine through our browser, and the browser is the app.

For most of the demos in this module we're actually going to use Chrome, Google Chrome. So here it is down here. I'm on a Windows 11 machine, and I'm going to click on Google Chrome to open it up. Now this is the browser, this is the client software. When I go to a site — let's say I go to techknowsurge.com and hit enter — that's being hosted from some sort of server that has a service running like Apache, and then it's delivering my request. My request is to get to this web page right here, and then it's delivering the contents of that web page to me. That is how this client server relationship works.

Comparing Browsers

We're going to explore a few different options here. Really, I find for the most part a lot of the options are very similar. We're going to explore Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari, and you'll see that they have a lot of the same similar components to them. It really doesn't matter which one we're using, it's just really more of a preference. There are a lot of other applications as well, a lot of other browsers as well. The ones that we're going to cover are just the most popular, and then those have maybe some different features and different ways about doing things, which is why there is so much variety out there. But I find the big ones that we're going to cover are really quite similar in nature.

We have Chrome right here. Let's go ahead and open up Firefox so we can see what Firefox looks like. So here's Firefox. One thing that all of these browsers do is they want you to use that browser as the primary browser. We don't want to do that, we don't want to change this, so I'm going to say don't show this message again, not now. Then we're going to see that the look and feel of this is laid out very similarly. We've got our search bar right here, we've got some icons up here, we've got tabs across the top, and we can open up different tabs just like we have with Chrome. So there's a lot of similarities between Firefox and Chrome.

Let's take a look at Microsoft Edge now. What I'm going to do is click the start menu and click on — actually, it popped up right there at the beginning — Microsoft Edge. I'd say Microsoft Edge is my least favorite. It just feels really cluttered to me, and Microsoft has an interesting way of doing their applications, so I'm not as big of a fan with this. But we can see that there's a lot of the similar components here, with tabs across the top. We've got some of our control icons over here, our URL. So really, once again, quite similar the way it's set up.

Safari is one of the ones that looks the most different out of the options, and one of the reasons for that is because it's on a Mac. We're on a Mac right here. We can see the Mac file bar here at the top, and then we have our different controls for the window here. It's laid out a little differently because it's on a Mac, but we still have our URL here, we still can do tabs. It's just that where we find those tabs, they look a little different and act a little different here. So this has a lot of the same features as the other options that we just looked at, except that it's just laid out a little differently.

Rendering and Application Support

Most of the sites that you go to nowadays are all going to look the same no matter what browser you use, whether it's Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. There might be subtle differences, but it's not going to be that drastic. That wasn't always the case — the way that the different browsers interpreted the sites was a little different, and it caused some problems. We've now standardized that for the most part, so we don't have near the same issue as we used to have.

However, we do still see that certain applications really prefer certain browsers and work better on certain browsers. Usually it's not a website or web page that's necessarily the issue, but some sort of application or software that we're accessing online through a website that can cause problems. There are certain apps that only are supported using certain browsers.

Let's look at an online application and see what the requirements are for it. I'm going to go to Microsoft Project Online requirements and hit enter and just take a look. In this particular case, their browser requirements are Internet Explorer, the most current and the immediate previous version; Microsoft Edge, the most current version; and Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, the most current version. That's what's supported on here. So really this application is supported on most major browsers.

I wanted to find an app that only worked on certain browsers, and it's a little more difficult to do now — it used to be very common. But one I found here is Google Identity, and it still runs on most major browsers here, Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, but it's not supported on all platforms. For instance, Firefox on iOS is not supported for this One Tap app. So it's just something to consider: what is the compatibility of these apps, and what browser are you going to need?