Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 19.73% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of August 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine. Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, the most popular of which include the NoScript JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, FoxyTunes media player control toolbar, Adblock Plus ad blocking utility, StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! download enhancer and Web Developer toolbar.

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.0.1, released on July 16, 2008. Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.

source:http://www.en.wikipedia.org

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser built with open source code that is developed by Google. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. Chromium is the name of the open source project behind Google Chrome, released under the BSD license.

A beta version for Microsoft Windows was released on 2 September 2008 in 43 languages.

source:http://www.en.wikipedia.org/

Orca Browser

Orca Browser

A brief background: My first access to the Internet was through my elementary school’s network. All computers were loaded with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, and I always went for IE. Netscape was bloated, slow, and the screen filled with useless clutter.Despite trying other browsers slowly over time, they were always slower and had toolbars and icons hogging too much screen space, leaving IE tops.

That is, until a later investigations of what was available. My first full browser switch was to Avant; based on the Trident (IE) engine, it was tabbed and featured a boatload of customizations and perhaps most importantly, featured “Compact Mode” cramming everything into a minimized space.

Being increasingly interested in computers and web development, it became increasingly clear that Internet Explorer itself was a liability. Merely using it put your computer at risk due to ActiveX, so IE and Trident-based browsers were out, and I haven’t used on for any significance since. I jumped to Dr. Orca, later Orca Browser, which was the Gecko (Mozilla) engine based version of Avant. Due to technical issues I moved on to find K-Meleon, which I used daily right up until just recently.

Where was I going with all this? Avant was always the most streamlined, fully featured and elegant of any browser. Orca just hadn’t gotten the development time to be stable and as well-polished. Well, guess what?

source:http://zurahn.wordpress.com/

Internet Explorer 8.0

Internet Explorer 8.0 is the latest version of Internet Explorer and has been in development since August 2007 at the latest. On March 5, 2008, the first public beta (Beta 1) was released to the general public. On August 27, 2008, the second public beta (Beta 2) was released. It supports Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 on both 32-bit as well as 64-bit architectures.

Security, ease of use, and improvements in RSS, CSS, and Ajax support are Microsoft's priorities for IE8. It includes much stricter compliance with web standards, including a planned full Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 compliance for the release version. All these changes allow Internet Explorer 8 to pass the Acid2 test. However, to prevent compatibility issues, IE8 also includes the IE7 rendering behavior. Sites that expect IE7 quirks can disable the IE8's breaking changes by including a meta element.

IE8 also includes numerous improvements to JavaScript support as well as performance improvements. It includes support for Accelerators - which allow supported web applications to be invoked without explicitly navigating to them - and WebSlices - which allows portions of page to be subscribed to and monitored from a redesigned Favorites Bar. Other features include InPrivate privacy features, and SmartScreen phishing filter.

source:-http://www.en.wikipedia.org/

Netscape Navigator (version 9.0)

Netscape confirmed on 23 January 2007 that Netscape Browser versions 8.0-8.1.2 was to be succeeded by a new stand-alone browser release, Netscape Navigator 9. Its features were said to include newsfeed support and become more integrated with the Propeller Internet portal, alongside more enhanced methods of discussion, submission and voting on web pages. It also sees the browser return to multi-platform support across Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Like Netscape version 8.x, the new release was be based upon the popular Mozilla Firefox (version 2.0), and supposedly have full support of all Firefox add-ons and plugins, some of which Netscape is already providing. Also for the first time since 2004, the browser was produced in-house with its own programming staff.

A beta of the program was first released on 5 June 2007. The final version was released on October 15, 2007.

On December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL would discontinue their web browser on February 1, 2008, due to low market share. On 2008-01-28, Netscape revised this date to 2008-03-01, and offered support for migration to Flock and Mozilla Firefox.

source:-http://www.en.wikipedia.org

Flock Browser

Flock is a web browser that specializes in providing social networking and other Web 2.0 features built into its user interface. The browser is built on Mozilla’s Firefox codebase. On June 16th 2008 Flock 2 based on Mozilla's Firefox 3 went into open beta.

The Flock browser is available as a free download, and supports Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms

Source:http://www.en.wikipedia.org/

Opera Browser

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company. Opera handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, IRC online chatting, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones, but for other devices it is not free.

Features of Opera include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing and malware protection, strong encryption when browsing secure web sites, and the ability to easily delete private data such as cookies and browsing history by simply clicking a button.

Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Though evaluations of Opera have been largely positive, Opera has captured only a fraction of the worldwide personal computer browser market. It is currently the fourth most widely used web browser for personal computers, behind Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Opera has a stronger market share, however, on mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal digital assistants. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices. In fact, approximately 40 million mobile phones have shipped with Opera pre-installed. Furthermore, Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems. Some television set-top boxes use Opera as well, and Adobe licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite.

Source:http://www.en.wikipedia.org/