What is a web browser?

A web browser takes you anywhere on the internet, letting you see text, images and video from
anywhere in the world.The web is a vast and powerful tool. Over the course of a few decades, the
internet has changed the way we work, the way we play and the way we interact with one another.
Depending on how it’s used, it bridges nations, drives commerce, nurtures relationships, drives the
innovation engine of the future and is responsible for more memes than we know what to do with.

It’s important that everyone has access to the web, but it’s also vital that we all understand the tools we
use to access it. We use web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple
Safari every day, but do we understand what they are and how they work? In a short period of time
we’ve gone from being amazed by the ability to send an email to someone around the world, to a
change in how we think of information. It’s not a question of how much you know anymore, but simply a
question of what browser or app can get you to that information fastest.

In a short period of time, we’ve gone from being amazed by the ability to send an email to someone
around the world, to a change in how we think about information.

How does a web browser work?

A web browser takes you anywhere on the internet. It retrieves information from other parts of the web
and displays it on your desktop or mobile device. The information is transferred using the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol, which defines how text, images and video are transmitted on the web. This
information needs to be shared and displayed in a consistent format so that people using any browser,
anywhere in the world can see the information.

Sadly, not all browser makers choose to interpret the format in the same way. For users, this means that
a website can look and function differently. Creating consistency between browsers, so that any user can
enjoy the internet, regardless of the browser they choose, is called web standards.

When the web browser fetches data from an internet connected server, it uses a piece of software called
a rendering engine to translate that data into text and images. This data is written in Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML) and web browsers read this code to create what we see, hear and experience on the
internet.
Hyperlinks allow users to follow a path to other pages or sites on the web. Every webpage, image and
video has its own unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is also known as a web address. When
a browser visits a server for data, the web address tells the browser where to look for each item that is
described in the html, which then tells the browser where it goes on the web page.

Cookies (not the yummy kind)

Websites save information about you in files called cookies. They are saved on your computer for the
next time you visit that site. Upon your return, the website code will read that file to see that it’s you. For
example, when you go to a website, the page remembers your username and password – that’s made
possible by a cookie.

There are also cookies that remember more detailed information about you. Perhaps your interests, your
web browsing patterns, etc. This means that a site can provide you more targeted content – often in the
form of ads. There are types of cookies, called third-party cookies, that come from sites you’re not even
visiting at the time and can track you from site to site to gather information about you, which is
sometimes sold to other companies. Sometimes you can block these kinds of cookies, though not all
browsers allow you to.

When you go to a website and the page remembers your username and password – that’s made possible
by a cookie.

Understanding privacy

Nearly all major browsers have a private browsing setting. These exist to hide the browsing history from
other users on the same computer. Many people think that private browsing or incognito mode will hide
both their identity and browsing history from internet service providers, governments and advertisers.
They don’t. These settings just clear the history on your system, which is helpful if you’re dealing with
sensitive personal information on a shared or public computer. Firefox goes beyond that.Firefox helps
you be more private online by letting you block trackers from following you around the web.

Making your web browser work for you

Most major web browsers let users modify their experience through extensions or add-ons. Extensions
are bits of software that you can add to your browser to customize it or add functionality. Extensions can
do all kinds of fun and practical things like enabling new features, foreign language dictionaries, or visual
appearances and themes.

All browser makers develop their products to display images and video as quickly and smoothly as
possible, making it easy for you to make the most of the web. They all work hard to make sure users
have a browser that is fast, powerful and easy to use. Where they differ is why. It’s important to choose
the right browser for you. Mozilla builds Firefox to ensure that users have control over their online lives
and to ensure that the internet is a global, public resource, accessible to all.

What Is Web Server?

A web server stores and delivers the content for a website – such as text, images, video, and application
data – to clients that request it. The most common type of client is a web browser program, which
requests data from your website when a user clicks on a link or downloads a document on a page
displayed in the browser.

A web server communicates with a web browser using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The
content of most web pages is encoded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The content can be static
(for example, text and images) or dynamic (for example, a computed price or the list of items a customer
has marked for purchase). To deliver dynamic content, most web servers support server-side scripting
languages to encode business logic into the communication. Commonly supported languages include
Active Server Pages (ASP), Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

A web server might also cache content to speed delivery of commonly requested content. This process is
also known as web acceleration.

A web server can host a single website or multiple websites using the same software and hardware
resources, which is known as virtual hosting. Web servers can also limit the speed of response to
different clients so as to prevent a single client from dominating resources that are better used to satisfy
requests from a large number of clients.

While web servers typically host websites that are accessible on the Internet, they can also be used to
communicate between web clients and servers in local area networks such as a company’s intranet. A
web server can even be embedded in a device such a digital camera so that the users can communicate
with the device via any commonly available Web browser.
How Can NGINX Plus Help?

NGINX Plus and NGINX are the best-in-class load-balancing solutions used by high-traffic websites such
as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. More than 350 million websites worldwide rely on NGINX Plus and
NGINX Open Source to deliver their content quickly, reliably, and securely.

NGINX Plus was developed specifically to solve the speed limitations inherent in web applications and
platforms. It combines multiple functions in one flexible, cost-effective solution for delivering static and
dynamic content in a fast and reliable manner that boosts customer satisfaction and revenue:

Web server

Web accelerator

Load balancer

Application gateway

WHAT IS WEB BROWSER?

A browser engine (also known as a layout engine or rendering engine) is a core software component of
every major web browser. The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and
other resources of a web page into an interactive visual representation on a user's device.

Name and scope

Besides "browser engine", two other related terms are commonly used: "layout engine" and "rendering
engine".[1][2][3] In theory, layout and rendering (or "painting") could be handled by different engines. In
practice, however, these components are tightly coupled and rarely encountered on their own outside of
the browser engine.[1][4]

In addition to layout and rendering, a browser engine enforces the security policy between documents,
handles navigation through hyperlinks and data submitted through forms, and implements the
Document Object Model (DOM) exposed to scripts associated with the document.[1][4]
Every major browser supports JavaScript to provide a wide range of dynamic behavior for web pages.
However, JavaScript is implemented as a separate JavaScript engine, which has enabled its usage
elsewhere. In a browser, the two engines are coordinated via the DOM and Web IDL bindings.[4]

Browser engines are also used in non-browser applications. An email client needs one to display HTML
email. Beginning in the 2010s, many apps have been created with the frameworks based on Google's
Chromium project; each of these standalone apps functions much like a web app. (Two examples are
Spotify and Slack.)[5][6]

Layout and rendering

The layout of a web page is typically specified by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Each style sheet is a series
of rules for how the page should be presented. For example, some rules specify typography details, such
as font, color, and text size, while others determine the placement of images. The engine combines all
relevant CSS rules to calculate precise graphical coordinates for the visual representation it will paint on
the screen.[1][4]

Some engines may begin rendering before a page's resources are downloaded. This can result in visual
changes as more data is received, such as images being gradually filled in or a flash of unstyled content.
[7]

Notable engines

Further information: Comparison of browser engines

Apple created the WebKit engine for its Safari browser by forking the KHTML engine of the KDE project.
[8] All browsers for iOS must use WebKit as their engine.[9]

Google originally used WebKit for its Chrome browser but eventually forked it to create the Blink engine.
[10] All Chromium-based browsers use Blink, as do applications built with CEF, Electron, or any other
framework that embeds Chromium.

Microsoft has two proprietary engines, Trident and EdgeHTML. Trident, also called MSHTML, is used in
the Internet Explorer browser. EdgeHTML, being a fork of Trident, was the original engine of the Edge
browser (now called Edge Legacy); it's still found in some UWP apps.[11] The new, Chromium-based Edge
was remade with the Blink engine.[12]

Mozilla develops the Gecko engine for its Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client.[2