Function

The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URI determines how the URI will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.

In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

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Features

Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".

All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.

Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Mozilla Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed. In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.

Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.

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COMPONENTS/CHIPSETS

A chipset or "PCIset" is a group of microcircuits that orchestrate the flow of data to and from key components of a PC. This includes the CPU itself, the main memory, the secondary cache and any devices situated on the ISA and PCI buses. The chipset also controls data flow to and from hard disks, and other devices connected to the IDE channels. While new microprocessor technologies and speed improvements tend to receive all the attention, chipset innovations are, in fact, equally important.

Although there have always been other chipset manufacturers - such as SIS, VIA and Opti - for many years Intel's "Triton" chipsets were by far the most popular. Indeed, the introduction of the Intel Triton chipset caused something of a revolution in the motherboard market, with just about every manufacturer using it in preference to anything else. Much of this was down to the ability of the Triton to get the best out of both the Pentium processor and the PCI bus, together with its built-in master EIDE support, enhanced ISA bridge and ability to handle new memory technologies like EDO and SDRAM. However, the new PCI chipsets" potential performance improvements will only be realised when used in conjunction with BIOSes capable of taking full advantage of the new technologies on offer.

During the late 1990s things became far more competitive, with Acer Laboratories (ALI), SIS and VIA Technologies all developing chipsets designed to operate with Intel, AMD and Cyrix processors. 1998 was a particularly important year in chipset development, with what had become an unacceptable bottleneck - the PC's 66MHz system bus - to finally being overcome. Interestingly, it was not Intel but rival chipmakers that made the first move, pushing Socket 7 chipsets to 100MHz. Intel responded with its 440BX, one of many chipsets to use the ubiquitous Northbridge/Southbridge architecture. It was not long before Intel's hold on the chipset market loosened further still, and again, the company had no-one but itself to blame. In 1999, its single-minded commitment to Direct Rambus DRAM (DRDRAM) left it in the embarrassing position of not having a chipset that supported the 133MHz system bus speed its latest range of processors were capable of. This was another situation it's rivals were able to exploit, and in so doing gain market share.

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COMPONENTS/SYSTEM MEMORY

The system memory is the place where the computer holds current programs and data that are in use, and, because of the demands made by increasingly powerful software, system memory requirements have been accelerating at an alarming pace over the last few years. The result is that modern computers have significantly more memory than the first PCs of the early 1980s, and this has had an effect on development of the PC's architecture. Storing and retrieving data from a large block of memory is more time-consuming than from a small block. With a large amount of memory, the difference in time between a register access and a memory access is very great, and this has resulted in extra layers of "cache" in the storage hierarchy.

When it comes to access speed, processors are currently outstripping memory chips by an ever-increasing margin. This means that processors are increasingly having to wait for data going in and out of main memory. One solution is to use "cache memory" between the main memory and the processor, and use clever electronics to ensure that the data the processor needs next is already in cache.

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