Browsers are the software used to view world wide web pages. The very first web browser was written by Tim Berners-Lee, while at CERN (a European center for physics research). However the first browser to obtain popularity was Mosaic, which was written by Marc Andreessen. However the two browsers that are the most popular at the moment are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Most browsers include the same kind of features however.
The back, forward, stop, refresh, home, search, favorites, address bar and history functions of Internet Explorer and now common for most browsers.
Currently the most popular of all browsers, with one reason being that it has been supplied with the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Internet Explorer also has a great set of features such as Activex and XML support with the downside being that it requires a lot of memory, CPU and disk space resources.