A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. Each individual web page, image, and video is identified by a distinct Uniform Resource Locator (URL), enabling browsers to retrieve these resources from a web server and display them on a user’s device.

A web browser is not the same thing as a search engine, though the two are often confused.[1][2] For a user, a search engine is just a website, such as google.com, that stores searchable data about other websites. But to connect to a website’s server and display its web pages, a user must have a web browser installed on their device.

As of March 2019, more than 4.3 billion people use a browser, which is about 55% of the world’s population.[4] The most popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge.