A helper application is an external viewer program launched to display content retrieved using a
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
.
Some examples include
JPEGview
JPEGView was a popular image viewer for Mac OS in the 1990s by Aaron Giles. Initially released in 1991, it was one of the first JPEG image viewers for Mac OS. The program was also the first postcardware. Giles said he had "received somewhere betwee ...
,
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on ...
,
QuickTime Player
QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avail ...
,
Real Player and
Adobe Reader
Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (forme ...
. Unlike a plugin whose full code is included into the browser's
address space
In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity.
For software programs to save and retrieve st ...
, a helper application is a standard application, typically an
image viewer
An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as color depth, ...
or similar type lacking full save functionality.
The use of helper applications was more common in the early days of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
, when HTML and file formats were still becoming standardized and computers were less powerful. Users of a slower computer could configure their browser to hand off all images using a helper application, which would cause the browser to display a standard
icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
as a placeholder. The user could click the icon only for images they wished to view, thus saving time and bandwidth. In addition, it was considered important for early browsers to be able to keep an image illustrating a figure or graph on screen while scrolling through a long scientific paper and having the image displayed in an external window while the browser window was scrolled allowed that.
See also
*
Plug-in (computing)
In computing, a plug-in (or plugin, add-in, addin, add-on, or addon) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization.
A theme or skin is a pre ...
*
Video player (software)
Media player software is a type of application software for playing multimedia computer files like audio and video files. Media players commonly display standard media control icons known from physical devices such as tape recorders and CD play ...
References
Web browsers
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