Subject areaChannels and tools
Also known asweb browser
A browser is the program you use to open and read pages on the World Wide Web.
It receives the code of a page from the server and turns it into text, images and buttons you can use. The most common today are Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox; the first browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee, and Mosaic, in 1993, was the one that took the Web out of the labs.
For marketers the browser matters for two reasons. Each browser interprets code in its own way, so a site tested on only one of them can break on another and lose exactly the customer segment that uses it. The browser is also the door through which outside tools come in: an employee opening a free AI service in the browser with a personal account is the textbook case of shadow AI.
An example
A manufacturer relaunches its website and tests it only on Chrome; customers who order from phones running Safari find the order form broken, and orders drop before anyone understands why.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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