 | This article needs to be updated.(October 2021) |
The following is a list of web browsers that are notable.
This is a table of personal computer web browsers by year of release of major version. The increased growth of the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s means that current browsers with small market shares have more total users than the entire market early on. For example, 90% market share in 1997 would be roughly 60 million users, but by the start of 2007 9% market share would equate to over 90 million users. [1]
Current and maintained projects are listed in boldface.
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Other software publishers have built browsers and other products around Microsoft's Trident engine. The following browsers are all based on that rendering engine:
Browsers that use both Trident and Gecko include:
| Status | Browser |
|---|---|
| Aloha Browser (iOS and Android) | |
| experimental | Amazon Kindle NetFront Browser |
| discontinued | Arora |
| discontinued | BOLT browser |
| Google Chrome for iOS | |
| Dolphin Browser (Android and Bada) | |
| discontinued | Dooble (qtwebkit version discontinued) (up to Version 1.56) |
| DuckDuckGo for Mac [23] | |
| Firefox for iOS | |
| discontinued | Flock (version 3.0 and above) |
| GNOME Web (Epiphany) | |
| iCab (version 4 uses WebKit; earlier versions used its own rendering engine) | |
| discontinued | Iris Browser |
| Konqueror (version 4 can use WebKit as an alternative to its native KHTML) [24] | |
| Maxthon (version 3.0 to 5.0. Since version 6 Maxthon uses Chromium [25] ) | |
| Midori | |
| Microsoft Edge for iOS | |
| Nintendo 3DS NetFront Browser | |
| Nintendo Wii U NetFront Browser NX | |
| discontinued | OmniWeb |
| Otter Browser (uses Blink and WebKit; aims to recreate the features of old Opera) | |
| discontinued | OWB |
| discontinued | QtWeb |
| qutebrowser (a Blink-based backend is currently used by default) | |
| discontinued | Rekonq |
| Safari | |
| discontinued | PhantomJS (a headless browser) |
| discontinued | Shiira |
| discontinued | SlimBoat [26] |
| discontinued | Steel for Android |
| surf | |
| discontinued | Uzbl |
| discontinued | Web Browser for S60, used in all Nokia Symbian smartphones |
| discontinued | webOS, used in the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, Pre 2, HP Veer, Pre 3, and TouchPad mobile devices |
| WebPositive, browser in Haiku | |
| discontinued | xombrero |
Browsers created for enhancements of specific browsing activities.
Mosaic was the first widely used web browser. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) licensed the technology and many companies built their own web browser on Mosaic. The best known are the first versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape.
A web browser is an application 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 a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people have used a browser. The most-used browser is Google Chrome, with a 64% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 19%.
Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.
A browser engine is a core software component of every major web browser. The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and other resources of a web page into an interactive visual representation on a user's device.
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 or later versions, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos, and Solaris Unix. It is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
A browser war is a competition for dominance in the usage share of web browsers. The "first browser war," (1995–2001) consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Browser wars continued with the decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the popularity of other browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Opera.
In computing, the User-Agent header is an HTTP header intended to identify the user agent responsible for making a given HTTP request. Whereas the character sequence User-Agent comprises the name of the header itself, the header value that a given user agent uses to identify itself is colloquially known as its user agent string. The user agent for the operator of a computer used to access the Web has encoded within the rules that govern its behavior the knowledge of how to negotiate its half of a request-response transaction; the user agent thus plays the role of the client in a client–server system. Often considered useful in networks is the ability to identify and distinguish the software facilitating a network session. For this reason, the User-Agent HTTP header exists to identify the client software to the responding server.
This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
Trident is a proprietary browser engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer, developed by Microsoft.
about is an internal URI scheme implemented in various Web browsers to reveal internal state and built-in functions. It is an IANA officially registered scheme, and is standardized.
Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a deprecated application programming interface (API) for web browser plugins, initially developed for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 and subsequently adopted by other browsers.
This article compares browser engines, especially actively-developed ones.
A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance.
This is a timeline of web browsers from 1990 to the present. Prior to browsers, many technologies and systems existed for information viewing and transmission. For an in-depth history of earlier web browsers, see the web browser article.
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It further provides for the capture or input of information which may be returned to the presenting system, then stored or processed as necessary. The method of accessing a particular page or content is achieved by entering its address, known as a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. This may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.
A site-specific browser (SSB) is a software application that is dedicated to accessing pages from a single source (site) on a computer network such as the Internet or a private intranet. SSBs typically simplify the more complex functions of a web browser by excluding the menus, toolbars and browser GUI associated with functions that are external to the workings of a single site. These applications are typically started by a desktop icon which is usually a favicon.
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, where it serves as the platform for web applications.
WebGL is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerated usage of physics, image processing, and effects in the HTML canvas. WebGL elements can be mixed with other HTML elements and composited with other parts of the page or page background.
BrowserChoice.eu was a website created by Microsoft in March 2010 following a decision in the European Union Microsoft competition case. The case involved legal proceedings by the European Union against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used this dominance to create a similar market position in the web browser market. The BrowserChoice.eu website was created to allow users that had not made, or were unaware of, a choice to try other browsers, and thus comply with the European Commission's ruling.
Microsoft Edge is a proprietary cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. Released in 2015 as part of Windows 10 and Xbox One, it was initially built with Microsoft's own proprietary browser engine, EdgeHTML, and their Chakra JavaScript engine. Later on, it was ported to Android and iOS as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project. In late 2018, Microsoft announced it would completely rebuild Edge as a Chromium-based browser with Blink and V8 engines, which allowed the browser to be ported to macOS. The new Edge was publicly released in January 2020, and on Xbox platforms in 2021. Microsoft has since terminated security support for the original browser. Edge is also available on older Windows versions, as well as Linux.
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