It used to be so simple. You had Eudora for your e-mail and your tiny Mosaic browser for trolling through text-only university archives and contemplating the bright future of the World! Wide! Web!
Then it became more complicated as Mosaic morphed into new-fangled versions of Netscape Navigator, which begat the ballooning Communicators, with mail, news and tail fins, which begat -- um, make that is begetting -- Mozilla. And jogging alongside has been Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which gradually eroded Netscape's browser share, and all the browsers-come-lately such as iCab, NeoPlanet and Opera.
Behind all of that we've got a lot of new ingredients: slices of DHTML and DOM, different flavors of Javascript, a dollop of Extensible Markup Language, a sprinkling of Cascading Style Sheets.