A Web Server and a Web Browser are terms that came in to play in 1990 when Tim Barnes Lee coded them both in order to provide a convenient channel for communication between a client and information storage. This was basically the start of internet, as we know it now. This project was implemented for CERN and the web server was known as CERN httpd and the web browser was called WorldWideWeb. Later in 1994, Tim Barnes Lee initiated World Wide Web Consortium, best known as W3C in order to regulate and standardize the development of the internet technologies including web servers and web browsers.
Web Server
A web server can be either a software unit or a hardware unit. We will talk about both of these counterparts together. In layman’s terms, a web server is a place where you store the content of a website. When you type in www. in your web browser, the address gets translated to the IP address of the server where the files of the DB are stored. This storage facility is in essence the web server and facilitates serving dynamic HTML content to any client who is requesting it.
With the recent developments, Web Server can serve dynamic content using server side scripting languages like PHP, ASP or JSP, as well. They serve a variety of clients including web browsers of the PCs, routers, printers, web cams etc. Another feature that can be seen in the web servers is the ability to acquire information from the clients using mechanisms such as forms or uploading. For instance, when you comment on this article, the web server acquires the content you used to comment and stores it.
Web Browser
You’re probably using a web browser to read this article right now. A web browser is basically software facilitating the retrieval of information from a web server. The information that is presented may be text, images, videos or any other content and sometimes third party plugins are used to display content inside web browsers. For instance, when you watch a video, a flash player plugin is generically needed to decode and present that information on your screen as a video.
A web browser uses a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) to locate information source. They work in the Application layer of the CISCO OSI model. You may identify a web browser better if I spell out some popular browsers in use. Does Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera sound familiar to you? I’m sure they do, and they are all web browsers. Thus, now you know the responsibilities of a web browser by experience.
Conclusion
It is implied that a web server and web browser work in unison to achieve the satisfaction of the consumers. A web server is needed to store information while a web browser is needed to locate this information and present them in a human friendly manner. They play an important part of your everyday life as Google does.