On Christmas Day, 25th December it was fifteen years since the invention of the web browser. For many, in fact for most people, the interactive, colourful (and too often noisy) web browser has always been there.

But, others of us remember being online before Internet Explorer. When people first began to use computers and phonelines to communicate the World Wide Web didn’t exist. I used to be a part of FidoNet, a communication network that was used by bulletin boards. I used to dial into the service and if I got a line in I would wade through several login pages and finally enter the bulletin board. The whole thing was text based and to navigate you had to use a combination of key strokes and typed commands. Just like you see in the movies! I could send email (it was called netmail), play games and download files. My modem was a blistering fast 2.4 kbps. Today modems reach 56 kbps, and high speed internet access at far greater speeds is the norm. My home connection is 2 megabytes per second – gazillions of times faster than the old 2.4 kbps modem.

Enough history! In my last post I mentioned Tim Berners-Lee and his vision of the World Wide Web. A central component of his vision was the browser. The web browser allows you to see web pages. It allows you to navigate the world of the WWW and to interact with the pages that you come across. Without the web browser, we’d still be typing in arcane commands and viewing everything without pictures, music or other multimedia.

Most of the time I use Firefox as my browser; on the Mac I use Camino or Safari. I like the flexibilty that Firefox offers and the fact that I can add in the extras that I want. Internet Explorer is due to be upgraded soon and hopefully it mean that more people will discover RSS and other internet goodies. Not to mention the security advances that Microsoft keep promising.

Thanks, Lorelle for your excellent post about the web browser!