What is a Browser

What is a Browser?

A browser is a graphical user interface (GUI) application program that retrieves and displays documents from Web sites. A browser has the ability to render text and graphics in the browser window.

More specifically it has the ability to:
DISPLAY

• Hypertext and hypermedia documents.
• Text in different fonts, styles, colors, and sizes.
• Foreign language character sets conforming to the ISO 8859 standard.
• Forms composed of text fields, text widgets, buttons, checkboxes, etc.
• Graphics in different formats.

INVOKE

• Helper applications.
• Plug-ins.

Browsers also have knowledge of other Internet services such as ftp, gopher, telnet, etc.