Browsers and winsock on windows

Question

Hello! Is thit true that all browsers on windows OS work thru winsock? thanks

Answer 1

I don't know for a fact that they all do (what does "all" mean, anyway?) But what else would they use? Winsock is the Windows Sockets API, through which access to network cards is mediated.

Answer 2

I think that all the browsers use actually Winsock2. It has several extensions over Winsock, most are related to the support of overlapped (asynchronous) I/O on sockets.

Specifically MS Internet Explorer uses a higher-level library called WinINet. Which in turn of course uses Winsock2.