wayne.edu, 2003). The first browser that was ever made called NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the early 1990s. Because of its graphical user interface, it was used on Macintosh computers and gave the popularity to the World Wide Web. Netscape Corporation introduced their first commercial web browser called Netscape Navigator. Eventually there was another web browser created, Internet Explorer (itep, 2003). It was developed by the Microsoft Corporation and can be used on PCs that were running Windows 3.1 or better, or on Macintosh systems. The two web browsers" easy to use "point-and-click" interfaces were so easy to use that they helped to popularize what has become the World Wide Web (learnthenet, 2003). .
Now these two web browsers go beyond just finding and displaying Web pages and documents. There are many handy features that are available for the user to choose from to help in the "surfing" as it is called of the internet. Some of the nifty features are the ability to send and receive e-mails, chat with others online, read and post messages to newsgroups, play audio and video files and to run other applications such as Java applets or ActiveX within a Web page or document (itep, 2003). But to view these wonderful extras, the user need to have downloaded and installed the correct helper applications. These "viewers" as they are called can be accessed through certain companies" websites and sometimes in the upgrades for the Web browser. Basically, viewer applications allow for the user to view movie clips, hear sound clips and to have images displayed on the screen and so on. For example, Internet Explorer can be configured so that Windows Media Player is the main video and audio player for the browser when the user clicks on an audio or video clip on a Web page (phdsystems, 2003). A couple of helper applications of Internet Explorer allows for the user to access most internet resources, even those through FTP, Gopher and telnet.