Simple understanding of Web Server and Web browser

When you enter http://jithendrianspeakingtechnically.blogspot.sg/ , lot of things running behind the screen and finally a set of images, texts, videos are rendered, presented to you. The application which brings those information from a remote computing device(s) to you is called web browser and the remote computing device(s) is/are called web server(s).

Communication between a web browser and a web server

A web browser and web server communicate between each other using a protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative etc..  computing systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the world wide web.

In the figure it is shown how the browser and server communicates. Browser requests a web page using http request and the server responses the requested web page through the http protocol

                         

Picture is taken from  http://www.codetoad.com/asp.net/aspnetcontrols2.asp

In next blog, I will discuss about how Internet works !! In that I will explain further on this protocols

Statistics on web browsers

Picture on Statistics on browser
and Servers : Source Wikipedia

For a decade (1995 - 2009) Internet Explorer had been dominating the browser market but after the arrival of  Google chrome, there is a continuous decrease in the usage of IE. Now Google chrome is picking up and the market share is almost 40 %. The above graph shows the web browsers share.

Firefox is consistent and Opera browser is coming up because it is being used in many mobile devices.

This is one of the biggest set back for Microsoft it seems. Let us see, they are developing many versions of IE but Google chrome has an excellent look and feel which could be the main reason for the replacement !! Let me also discuss on Browser wars in future.

Statistics on web servers

 

Almost 65% of web server share is taken by Apache server. This is because of its extensive usage in academics and other research works. This is an open source. 

Next is Microsoft IIS which is used by many organizations which use Microsoft based applications such as ASP.net, .NET framework etc..

Other servers occupy very less space in the server wars. But in future due to the benefits in investing on web servers, there is a potential competition in server market.