browser
Pluralbrowsers
- 1Ellipsis of web browser.
The site loads cleanly in almost any modern browser.
Clear the cache if your browser keeps showing the old page.
Note
The shortening appears in the Web's founding documents. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau's 1990 WorldWideWeb proposal speaks of "a program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser." The full compound is also written capitalized, as Web browser, but the clipped form needs no capital. For other navigating tools, a modifier usually signals the wider software sense.
- 2A person who examines goods on display without buying any of them.
The boutique tolerates browsers who handle everything and buy little.
A casual browser drifted past the jewelry counter without a second glance.
Note
Here the browsing happens in a shop, and the word marks the line between looking and paying. It pairs naturally with buyer. David Holland, writing in Gay Community News in 1976, describes an antique shop expanded "just in time for browsers and buyers." That pairing is the useful pattern: the noun suggests unhurried looking without commitment, not any fault in the person doing it.
- 3A person, animal, or thing that browses.
A browser by nature, he rarely commits to a purchase on a first visit.
Unlike grazers, browsers such as giraffes feed selectively on twigs and leaves.
Note
The agent noun built plainly from browse + -er, and it covers anything that browses, people and animals alike. In ecology it becomes a class term for leaf- and twig-eaters. R. Norman Owen-Smith's Megaherbivores (1988) calls the giraffe's dentition "typical of browsers." In that technical use it usually appears in the plural, naming a feeding style set against grazing.
- 4A software program for navigating and viewing a particular kind of stored information, such as files, data, or objects, rather than web pages.
The browser lets analysts explore every table in the database without writing a query.
A good object browser displays the class hierarchy at a glance.
Note
Software took the web sense and widened it to any tool for moving through stored information. In this broader use the noun usually carries a modifier that names what is being explored. Examples include file browser, object browser, and the augmented-reality browsers of Lester Madden's Professional Augmented Reality Browsers for Smartphones (2011). Without a modifier, readers will hear the web browser.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of browser apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from "browse" combined with the suffix "-er".