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/

Avant Browser 11

Avant Browser 11 (build 25 released on October 23, 2006), introduces more new features than any previous iteration. These include support for many toolbars that are compatible with IE, a facility for users to create their own scripted toolbar buttons, and a password and form-filling wizard. The overall trend though seems to be a gradual movement away from Avant's IE roots.

More radical is the addition of a native bookmark system in place of sharing IE's favorites. These bookmarks may be stored online - as can feeds, autofills, and browser settings. This allows the user to synchronize any number of Avant installations on different computers. Avant can still share IE's favorites. This option was reintroduced by the developer after some users lamented its loss.

Another innovation is that Avant may now be run from a flash drive (or other portable storage device such as an MP3 player) without needing to be installed. In conjunction with Avant's session saving facility, this allows the user to halt a browsing session on one PC, move to another and resume viewing the same web pages.

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

Safari Browser

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included in Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta on January 7, 2003, and is the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 and later. It is also the native browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Safari for Windows was released on June 11, 2007. Windows XP and Windows Vista are supported.

Since the release of Safari, its usage share has been steadily climbing. According to Net Applications, Safari's marketshare for May 2008 was 6.25%.

Features:

Safari offers most features common to modern web browsers. In addition, some of these features are implemented in distinctive ways, while it also includes some unique to the browser:

• A tabbed browsing interface that allows dragging tabs to reorder them, moving them between windows or creating new windows
• A bookmark management scheme reminiscent of the iTunes jukebox software
• A resizable web-search box in the toolbar. This uses Google on the Mac and either Google or Yahoo! on Windows
• Pop-up ad blocking
• History and bookmark search including search of content in history pages
• As-you-type text search
• Spell-checking for all text entry fields
• Expandable text entry boxes, which can be resized by the user to make entering long texts easier
• Automatic filling in of web forms
• Built-in password management via Keychain
• Functionality for subscribing to and reading web feeds
• Quartz-style font-smoothing, even on Windows
• Integration of Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology
• Support for user-specified style sheets
• The Web Inspector, a DOM Inspector-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object Model of a web page
• A high level of standards compliance through its use of the WebKit framework, including partial, preliminary support for CSS3 and HTML 5

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

Maxthon

Maxthon is a China-based freeware browser for Windows. From its early MyIE2 roots, Maxthon has developed a growing user base, especially in China, and in 2006 it received commercial backing for Maxthon 2.0. It uses the Trident layout engine, just like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but it can use the Gecko engine used in Mozilla Firefox as well.

Maxthon seeks to provide many rich features and a highly customizable interface, without losing any of the compatibility of Internet Explorer.

In January 2006, Maxthon developers partnered with Microsoft in its booth at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Maxthon is reported to be the second most popular browser in China, and it has been downloaded more than 150 million times worldwide.

Source:-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/