Which of the following is regarded as the first widely used graphical web browser, released in 1993?

The correct answer is B, Tim Berners-Lee. He was a British scientist working at CERN in Switzerland when he wrote the proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989, and he built the first browser, WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus; the first website went live in 1991. He also founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Option A, Charles Babbage, belongs to the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, not to the Web at all. Option C, Vinton Cerf, with Robert Kahn designed the TCP/IP protocols and is called a father of the internet, which is the network beneath the Web, so he is the classic distractor in this question. Option D, Marc Andreessen, led the team that wrote Mosaic in 1993 and later founded Netscape, but he came after Berners-Lee and invented neither the Web nor the first browser.

The correct answer is B, Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the complete address of a resource on the Web, and it has three visible parts: the protocol, such as https, the domain name, such as www.example.in, and the path to the particular page inside that site. Option A, Universal Resource Link, mixes the right idea with the wrong words; the first word is uniform, not universal, and the last is locator, not link, so it is wrong even though it sounds familiar. Option C, Unified Retrieval Locator, invents a term that no standard uses and should be rejected at sight. Option D, Uniform Reference Line, keeps only the first word correctly and is otherwise meaningless. Examiners rely on candidates half-remembering the expansion, so learn the three words in order: uniform, resource, locator.

The correct answer is C, Blink. The browser engine, also called the layout or rendering engine, is the part that turns the HTML received from a server into the page you see, and Chrome has used Blink since 2013; Opera and Microsoft Edge use the same engine today, which is why pages look alike in all three. Option A, Gecko, is the engine of Mozilla Firefox, and it grew out of the old Netscape code, so it is the right answer to a different question. Option B, Trident, was the engine of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and is no longer in use now that Edge has replaced that browser. Option D, WebKit, is Apple's engine and powers Safari; Blink itself began as a branch of WebKit, which is why the two names are so often confused in papers.

The correct answer is B, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two were research students at Stanford University in the United States, and the ranking method they built, PageRank, is named after Larry Page rather than after web pages, a point papers like to test. Option A, Jerry Yang and David Filo, founded Yahoo! in 1994, four years before Google, and Yahoo began life as a hand-made directory of websites rather than a crawler-based engine. Option C, Gabriel Weinberg, started DuckDuckGo in 2008, the engine known for not keeping a profile of its users. Option D, Robin Li and Eric Xu, founded Baidu in China in 2000, which is the leading search engine of that country. Remember the four pairs with their years and countries, because questions are set by swapping one founder for another.

The correct answer is C, Safari. Apple released Safari in 2003 and ships it with its computers, tablets and phones; it runs on Apple's own WebKit engine. Option A, Google Chrome, released in 2008, is the browser most used worldwide and can certainly be installed on a Mac, but it is not the one supplied with the system, and the question asks for the default. Option B, Microsoft Edge, released in 2015, is the default browser of current versions of Windows, replacing Internet Explorer there, so it is the right answer only if the question names Windows. Option D, Mozilla Firefox, released in 2004 by the Mozilla Foundation, is free and open-source and is the browser bundled with several Linux distributions, but again it must be installed separately on a Mac. Match each operating system with its own browser: Windows with Edge, macOS with Safari.