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Category
Internet browsing
Summary
A web browser is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its 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 65% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%.
A web browser is not the same thing as a search engine, though the two are often confused. A search engine is a website that provides links to other websites. However, to connect to a website's server and display its web pages, a user must have a web browser installed. In some technical contexts, browsers are referred to as user agents.
The purpose of a web browser is to fetch content from the World Wide Web or from local storage and display it on a user's device. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), such as https://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. Virtually all URLs are retrieved using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a set of rules for the transfer of data. If the URL uses the secure mode of HTTP (HTTPS), the connection between the browser and the web server is encrypted for the purposes of communications security and information privacy.
Web pages usually contain hyperlinks to other pages and resources. Each link contains a URL, and when it is clicked or tapped, the browser navigates to the new resource. Most browsers use an internal cache of web page resources to improve loading times for subsequent visits to the same page. The cache can store many items, such as large images, so they do not need to be downloaded from the server again. Cached items are usually only stored for as long as the web server stipulates in its HTTP response messages.
During the course of browsing, cookies received from various websites are stored by the browser. Some of them contain login credentials or site preferences.
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