The Certification Authority Browser Forum, also known as CA/Browser Forum, is a voluntary consortium of certification authorities, vendors of Internet browser software, operating systems, and other PKI (Encrypted) applications that make the industry guidelines. It governs the issuance and management of SSL and Code Signing digital certificates that chain to a trust anchor root that is embedded in such applications.
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is the notarizer that issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key that is passed to client by websites, server systems and other applications when performing encryption. If the security of the certificate is ever compromised the CA can revoke the certificate making browsers not trust the website or applications where the certificate is running on.
Without the CA/Browser Forum, there would be no standards in the industry regarding digital certificates! The main purpose of getting a Certificate from a CA is to establish to your clients that the websites/application public/private key meets the standards of the industry and notarizes that the secure communication between client and server is indeed who they say they are. Any deviation between the name of the website and the notarization of the Common Name of the certificate that it was issued to would spark warnings within a browser denoting a possible man in the middle attack, or negligence in managing the server.
To keep up with the progress of technology the CA/Browser Forum is always coming up with new standards to help protect against internet security issues such as the distribution of digitally signed code, revocation/certificate-validity checking, the domain name system, and other issues of common interest to CAs, Internet software providers, website owners, and Internet users. Information is always publicly available all the time at cabforum.org