The Gopher protocol is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to HTTP. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.
Links is a free software text and graphical web browser with a pull-down menu system. It renders complex pages, has partial HTML 4.0 support, supports color and monochrome terminals, and allows horizontal scrolling.
Lynx is a customizable text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals. As of 2023, it is the oldest web browser still being maintained, having started in 1992.
Dillo is a minimalistic web browser particularly intended for older or slower computers and embedded systems. It supports only plain HTML/XHTML and images over HTTP; scripting is ignored entirely. Current versions of Dillo can run on Linux, BSD, OS X, IRIX and Cygwin. Due to its small size, it is the browser of choice in several space-conscious Linux distributions. Released under the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later, Dillo is free software.
KHTML is a discontinued browser engine that was developed by the KDE project. It originated as the engine of the Konqueror browser in the late 1990s, but active development ceased in 2016. It was officially discontinued in 2023.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
LXR Cross Referencer, usually known as LXR, is a general-purpose source code indexer and cross-referencer for code comprehension that provides web-based browsing of source code, with links to the definition and usage of any identifier.
Google Web Toolkit, or GWT Web Toolkit, is an open-source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain JavaScript front-end applications in Java. It is licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Uzbl is a discontinued free and open-source minimalist web browser designed for simplicity and adherence to the Unix philosophy. Development began in early 2009 and is still considered in alpha software by the developers. The core component of Uzbl is written in C, but other languages are also used, most notably Python. All parts of the Uzbl project are released as free software under GNU GPL-3.0-only.
Arora is a discontinued free and open-source web browser developed by Benjamin C. Meyer. It was available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, OS/2, Haiku, Genode, and any other operating system supported by the Qt toolkit. The browser's features included tabbed browsing, bookmarks, browsing history, smart location bar, OpenSearch, session management, privacy mode, a download manager, WebInspector, and AdBlock.
A lightweight web browser is a web browser that sacrifices some of the features of a mainstream web browser in order to reduce the consumption of system resources, and especially to minimize the memory footprint.
Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard introduced to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. It is a Candidate Recommendation of the W3C working group on Web Application Security, widely supported by modern web browsers. CSP provides a standard method for website owners to declare approved origins of content that browsers should be allowed to load on that website—covered types are JavaScript, CSS, HTML frames, web workers, fonts, images, embeddable objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, audio and video files, and other HTML5 features.
Emscripten is an LLVM/Clang-based compiler that compiles C and C++ source code to WebAssembly, primarily for execution in web browsers.
Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Inc., it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub by open-source developers. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Brackets is cross-platform, available for macOS, Windows, and most Linux distributions. The main purpose of Brackets is its live HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing functionality.
Servo is an experimental browser engine designed to take advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the Rust programming language. It seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, and other engine components are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks. It also makes use of GPU acceleration to render web pages quickly and smoothly.
Blink is a browser engine developed as part of the Chromium project with contributions from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Opera Software, Vivaldi Technologies, Adobe, Intel, IBM, Samsung, and others. It was first announced in April 2013.
A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface.
WebAssembly defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment.
Vue.js is an open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript library for building user interfaces and single-page applications. It was created by Evan You, and is maintained by him and the rest of the active core team members.
