What does browser mean?
A browser is, in its dominant modern sense, a software application that retrieves, displays, and navigates content on the World Wide Web, interpreting languages such as HTML and allowing users to follow links between pages. Familiar examples include Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. The word derives from the verb 'to browse', which historically meant to feed on leaves and twigs — a sense still applied to goats and deer — and later came to mean inspecting goods or reading matter in an unhurried, open-ended way. From that figurative sense, computing borrowed 'browser' in the late twentieth century for programs that let users wander through information. Beyond technology, a browser may be a shopper idly looking through store displays or a reader skimming shelves, and in ecological contexts it describes herbivores that eat high-growing vegetation rather than grazing on grass. Register is neutral: the term suits both technical documentation and casual conversation, though its everyday sense today is overwhelmingly digital.
A software application used to access, render, and navigate websites on the World Wide Web.
"The site works best in an up-to-date browser."
This is the overwhelmingly dominant sense in contemporary usage.
A person who examines goods, information, or texts in a casual, unhurried way, typically without a specific purchase or answer in mind.
"The shopkeeper was happy to let the browsers wander undisturbed."
An animal that feeds on leaves, shoots, and other elevated vegetation rather than grazing on grass.
"Goats are notorious browsers, stripping shrubs well above the reach of sheep."
Chiefly used in ecological and agricultural writing.
Regular plural; applies across all three senses of the noun.
"Most modern browsers block third-party cookies by default."
The world's first web browser was literally named 'WorldWideWeb' — Tim Berners-Lee built it in 1990 and made it also the world's first web editor.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of browser
The noun 'browser' is formed from the verb 'browse' plus the agentive suffix '-er'. 'Browse' entered English around the fifteenth century from Old French 'broster' or 'brouster', meaning to eat buds and shoots, though its ultimate deeper origins are uncertain. Its meaning broadened figuratively to describe casual inspection of books or merchandise, and in the early 1990s the computing industry applied the word to programs for navigating the newly invented World Wide Web, making 'web browser' one of the defining coinages of the internet age.
Related word forms
How browser is actually used
In everyday modern usage, 'browser' almost always means web-browsing software, so context usually makes the sense clear. The computing sense is standard in both formal and informal registers worldwide. The older senses — a casual shopper or reader, and an animal feeding on foliage (common in ecology writing) — remain current but far less frequent.
Easily confused with browser
A bowser is a container or tanker for storing and dispensing fuel (or, in Australia, a petrol pump), whereas a browser is software for viewing web pages or an entity that browses.