The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.

The usage share of web browsers. Source: Median values from summary table The usage share of web browsers is the percentage of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser. For example, when it is said that Internet Explorer has 52% usage share, it means that some version of Internet Explorer is used by 52% of visitors that visit a given set of sites. Internet Explorer Windows Internet Explorer , is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6 (53.26%; ) Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. A Net Applications statistic put Firefox at 24.59% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2010[update], making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft's (31.60%; ) Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web (8.00%) Safari Safari is a graphical web browser developed by Apple and included as part of the Mac OS X operating system. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther." Safari is also the native browser for the iPhone OS. A (5.40%) Opera Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading Web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile (1.82%) Other (0.89%)

Contents

Web browser history

Web browsers by year

A rough estimation of usage share by percent of layout engines/web browsers as of Q2 2009, see usage share of web browsers The usage share of web browsers is the percentage of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser. For example, when it is said that Internet Explorer has 52% usage share, it means that some version of Internet Explorer is used by 52% of visitors that visit a given set of sites.

This is a table of personal computer web browsers by year of release of major version, in chronological order, with the approximate number of worldwide Internet users in millions. Note that Internet user data is related to the entire market, not the versions released in that year. 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]

Year Web Browsers Internet Users (in millions)[1]
1991 WorldWideWeb WorldWideWeb, later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion about the software and the World Wide Web, was the first web browser and editor. When it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web
1992 ViolaWWW ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web. It was recommended by CERN at that time, Erwise Erwise was a pioneering web browser, and the first with a graphical user interface, MidasWWW MidasWWW was one of the earliest web browsers, developed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center . It ran under Unix and VMS. The last release was version 2.2, MacWWW MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early web browser from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh computers. It was the first web browser for the Mac OS platform, and the first for any non-Unix operating system. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of WorldWideWeb. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window. It was a commercial product from
1993 Mosaic Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, Usenet, and Gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public. Mosaic was, Cello Cello was an early shareware 16-bit multipurpose web browser for Windows 3.1 developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, and thus was among the first free winsock browsers. It was reported that it worked without any problems on Windows NT 3.5 and with[2], Lynx 2.0 Lynx is a text-only Web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals. It is released as Free software under the GNU General Public License. Supported protocols are Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, WAIS, and NNTP, Arena Arena is a web browser developed by the W3C for testing support for HTML 3 and Cascading Style Sheets, AMosaic 1.0 AMosaic is an Amiga port of the Mosaic web browser, developed starting from 1993. It was the first non-*NIX port of Mosaic, and the first graphical web browser made available for the Amiga. AMosaic was based on NCSA's Mosaic, but was not distributed by the University of Illinois or NCSA. The last version of AMosaic was a 2.0 prerelease
1994 IBM WebExplorer IBM WebExplorer was an early web browser designed at IBM facilities in the Research Triangle Park for OS/2, Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was partly due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web, SlipKnot 1.0 SlipKnot was one of the earliest World Wide Web browsers, available to Microsoft Windows users between November 1994 and January 1998. It was created by Peter Brooks of MicroMind, Inc. to provide a fully graphical view of the web for users without a SLIP or other TCP/IP connection to the net, hence the name - SLIP...not. Slipknot provided a, MacWeb MacWeb was an early Mac OS-only web browser for 68k and PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers, developed by TradeWave between 1994 and 1996. MacWeb's major attraction was its ability to run well on low-end hardware, with small memory (1 MB or less) and disk (680 kB, small enough to fit on a floppy disk) footprints as well as fast (but simple) page, IBrowse IBrowse is an MUI-based web browser for the Amiga range of computers, and was a rewritten follow-on to Amiga Mosaic, one of the first web browsers for the Amiga Computer. IBrowse was originally developed for a company called Omnipresence, now defunct. The original author has since continued development of IBrowse, Argo Argo was part of a project to make the Internet accessible to scholars in the Humanities at the University of Groningen. The Argo web browser was created in August 1994 by Bert Bos, Minuet Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool is an integrated Internet package for DOS Operating Systems on IBM-compatible PCs
1995 Internet Explorer 1 Internet Explorer 1.0 was a web browser debuted from Microsoft on August 16, 1995. It was a reworked version of Spyglass Mosaic which Microsoft had licensed, like many other companies initiating browser development, from Spyglass Inc. It came with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 and OEM release of Windows 95. It was installed as part of the, Netscape Navigator 2.0 Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was partly due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web, OmniWeb OmniWeb is a proprietary Internet web browser developed and marketed by The Omni Group. It is available exclusively for Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. Like many of its competitors in the Macintosh alternative browser market, Mozilla's Firefox and Camino, for instance, OmniWeb is available as a free download, UdiWWW The UdiWWW HTML3 browser was an early freeware graphical HTML 3 web browser for 16-bit and 32-bit Microsoft Windows. It was written and developed by Bernd Richter in C/C++ from 1995 to 1996. Following the release of version 1.2 in April 1996, Richter ceased development, stating "let Microsoft with the ActiveX Development Kit do the rest."[3], WebRouser WebRouser was a 1995 web browser, based on Mosaic with a number of additional capabilities, including plugins, client-side image maps, and web-page-defined browser buttons and menus. It was created by the founders of Eolas, Dr. Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong Ang, at the University of California, San Francisco in 1993. It was demonstrated[4], Internet Explorer 2 Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 is a graphical web browser released on November 22, 1995 by Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT and in April 1996 for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1. Version 2.0 featured support for SSL, cookies, VRML, and Internet newsgroups, Grail Grail was a free extensible multi-platform web browser written in the Python programming language. The project was started in August 1995, with its first public release in November of that year. The .3 beta contained over 27,000 lines of Python. Its last release was of version 0.6 in 1999, with latest version under development 16
1996 Arachne 1.0 Arachne is a full-screen Internet suite containing a graphical web browser, email client, and dialer. It primarily runs on DOS based operating systems, but includes builds for Linux as well. Arachne was originally created by Michael Polak in the C language and compiled using Borland C++ 3.1 compiler, but since been released under the GPL as, Internet Explorer 3.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 is a graphical web browser released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS . It began serious competition against Netscape Navigator in the first Browser war. It was the first more widely used version of Internet Explorer, although it did not surpass Netscape or, Netscape Navigator 3.0 Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was partly due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web, Opera 2.0, PowerBrowser 1.5 Oracle PowerBrowser was a web browser created in 1996 by Oracle Corporation. It featured a multiple document interface and offered the possibility to act as a web server allowing users to host webpages on their computers. However, it completely lacked CSS and scripting support[5], Cyberdog Cyberdog was an internet suite developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of Mac OS 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems, Amaya 0.9 Amaya is a free and open source WYSIWYG web authoring tool with browsing abilities, created by a structured editor project at the INRIA, a French national research institution, and later adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium , the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. It is very lightweight, meaning it does not use[6], AWeb AWeb is a web browser for the Amiga range of computers. Originally developed by Yvon Rozijn, AWeb was shipped with version 3.9 of AmigaOS, and is now open source, Voyager Voyager is a web browser for the Amiga range of computers, developed by VaporWare 36
1997 Internet Explorer 4.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It", Netscape Navigator 4.0 Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was partly due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web, Netscape Communicator 4.0 Netscape Communicator is an Internet suite that was produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises, Opera 3.0[7], Amaya 1.0 Amaya is a free and open source WYSIWYG web authoring tool with browsing abilities, created by a structured editor project at the INRIA, a French national research institution, and later adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium , the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. It is very lightweight, meaning it does not use[6] 70
1998 Internet Explorer 5.0 Beta 1 Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 is a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. (See also Internet Explorer for Mac or for Unix.), iCab iCab is a web browser for the Macintosh by Alexander Clauss, derived from Crystal Atari Browser for Atari TOS compatible computers. It is the most recently actively developed browser for 68k-based Macintoshes that features tabbed browsing[citation needed] and one of a very few browsers that was still updated in the recent past for the classic Mac, Mozilla The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation 147
1999 Amaya 2.0 Amaya is a free and open source WYSIWYG web authoring tool with browsing abilities, created by a structured editor project at the INRIA, a French national research institution, and later adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium , the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. It is very lightweight, meaning it does not use[6], Mozilla M3 The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation, Internet Explorer 5.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 is a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. (See also Internet Explorer for Mac or for Unix.) 248
2000 Konqueror, Netscape 6, Opera 4[8], Opera 5[9], K-Meleon 0.2, Amaya 3.0[6], Amaya 4.0[6] 361
2001 Internet Explorer 6, Galeon 1.0, Opera 6[10], Amaya 5.0[6] 513
2002 Netscape 7, Mozilla 1.0, Phoenix 0.1, Links 2.0, Amaya 6.0[6], Amaya 7.0[6] 587
2003 Opera 7[11], Safari 1.0, Epiphany 1.0, Amaya 8.0[6] 719
2004 Firefox 1.0, Netscape Browser, OmniWeb 5.0 817
2005 Safari 2.0, Netscape Browser 8.0, Opera 8.[12], Epiphany1.8, Amaya 9.0[6], AOL Explorer1.0, Maxthon 1.0, Shiira 1.0 1018
2006 SeaMonkey 1.0, K-Meleon 1.0, Galeon 2.0, Camino 1.0, Firefox 2.0, Avant 11, iCab 3, Opera 9[13], Internet Explorer 7, Sputnik 1093
2007 Maxthon 2.0, Netscape Navigator 9, NetSurf 1.0, Flock 1.0, Safari 3.0, Conkeror 1262
2008 Konqueror 4, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.5[14], Firefox 3, Amaya 10.0[6], Flock 2, Chrome 1, Amaya 11.0[6] 1565
2009 Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2, Safari 4, Opera 10[15], Chrome 3, SeaMonkey 2, Camino 2, Firefox 3.5 1734
2010 Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.50[16]
See also: microbrowser

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Isn't it Painful, when you type out a LONG Answer in Y/A, and then can't post it due to site maintenance?!?
Q. Man that stings! Just recently I had typed a virtual "e-book", with all kinds of references, quotations, jokes, metaphors, similes, oxymorons, comparisons, charts, graphs, fractions, equations, transliterations, juxtapositions...ok, ok, well maybe not all that, but the point is that it was alot, and very well put together if I may say so myself (self approval processing...loading...lo ading...approved). And just as soon as I edited it, and tried to post it...it was like, "oopsies, Y/A is under maintenance, We're sorry but you just wasted 18 minutes of your time, come back later loser...on the bright side you can still play one of Yahoo's great online games like Donna's Dollhouse Decorator" lol Unbelievable!! And of course when I tryed… [cont.]
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A. I die inside a little each time that happens, or when I give a Great answer, to a ranting query, and then the query gets pulled. I've taken to saving my answers if they are REALLY important to me, either on "notepad" or IM, that way I still have it for when Maintainence is over, or for when the Angry Rant "Question" is posted back up. As I think was already mentioned, if you see your answer didn't post, didn't post completely, etc. if you use the Back button, you can try resubmitting. If that doesn't work, I find highlighting the whole thing, clicking "copy" then clicking on the Answer button, and starting fresh works well. Then all you gots to do is push Paste and it pops right back up.
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