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The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date.
General information
Basic general information about the browsers: creator/company, license/price etc.
|
| Creator
| First public release date
| Latest stable version
| Cost (USD)
| Software license
| Current layout engine
|
| Amaya
| W3C
| Nov 1996
| 9.0
| Free
| W3C
| ?
|
| Camino
| Mozilla Foundation
| Feb 2002
| 0.8.2
| Free
| MPL
| Gecko
|
| Dillo
| Arellano Cid, Geerken, Rota, et al.
| Dec 1999
| 0.8.4
| Free
| GPL
| ?
|
| ELinks
| Fonseca, et al.
| ?
| 0.10.1
| Free
| GPL
| ?
|
| Epiphany
| GNOME
| Dec 2002
| 1.4.7
| Free
| GPL
| Gecko
|
| Galeon
| GNOME
| Jun 2000
| 1.3.18
| Free
| GPL
| Gecko
|
| iCab
| iCab Company
| 1998
| 2.9.8
| Preview free
Pro $30
| Proprietary
| iCab
|
| Internet Explorer
| Microsoft,
Spyglass, Inc.
| Aug 1995
| 6.0 SP2
| Part of Windows 1
| Proprietary
| Trident (Win),
Tasman (Mac)
|
| K-Meleon
| Doozan, Erikson, Vallet, et al.
| Nov 2000
| 0.9
| Free
| GPL
| Gecko
|
| Konqueror
| KDE
| Oct 2000
| 3.3
| Free
| GPL
| KHTML
|
Links
(Non-GUI)
| Patocka, et al.
| Nov 1999
| 0.99
| Free
| GPL
| ?
|
Lynx
(Non-GUI)
| Montulli, Grobe, Rezac, et al.
| Jul 1993
| 2.8.5
| Free
| GPL
| ?
|
| Mosaic
| Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, NCSA
| Apr 1993
| 2.6
| Free for Non-commercial use
| Proprietary
| ?
|
| Mozilla
| Mozilla Foundation
| Dec 1998
| 1.7.5
| Free
| MPL
| Gecko
|
| Mozilla Firefox
| Mozilla Foundation
| Sep 2002
| 1.0
| Free
| MPL
| Gecko
|
| Netscape
| Netscape Communications Corporation,
Mozilla Foundation (since 2000)
| Oct 1994
| 7.2
| Free
| NPL
| Gecko
|
| OmniWeb
| Omni Group
| Mar 1995
| 5.1
| $30
| Proprietary,
LGPL
| WebCore
(Modified KHTML)
|
| Opera
| Opera Software
| Sep 1996
| 7.54u2
| $39
Free with ads
| Proprietary
| Presto
|
| Safari
| Apple Computer
| Jun 2003
| 1.2.4
| Part of Mac OS X 1
| Proprietary,
LGPL
| WebCore
(Modified KHTML)
|
| WorldWideWeb
| Tim Berners-Lee
| Jan 1991
| 0.17
| Free
| ?
| ?
|
|
| Creator
| First public release date
| Latest stable version
| Cost (USD)
| Software license
| Current layout engine
|
Note (1): Windows XP is required to install the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows, and Mac OS X 10.3 is required to install the latest version of Safari. The last stand-alone version of Internet Explorer is 6.0 SP1, which can be installed on Windows 98 and later.
Operating system support
The operating systems the browsers can run on without emulation.
Browser features
Information about what common browser features are implemented.
Note (2): Internet Explorer is the only browser to support the Component Object Model (known also as ActiveX) natively. The embedding of ActiveX into Internet Explorer can add functionality to the browser, however this can also lead to infection with computer viruses, trojans and spyware infections.
Note (3): Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox support simple domain name-based image blocking. More advanced regular expression-based Ad filtering can be added with the AdBlock (http://adblock.mozdev.org) extension. Spelling checking can be added with the spellbound (http://spellbound.sourceforge.net) extension.
Web technologies support
Information about what web standards, and technologies the browsers support. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browser or extensions that provide such functionality.
Note (4): CSS2, a candidate W3C recommendation, is the most widely supported version of CSS.
Note (5): XHTML is based on HTML but is an application of XML, which means that XHTML must be stricter than equivalent HTML code. XHTML is meant to be read by an XML parser but for backward compatibility reasons can also be parsed as HTML; this table only notes the browsers that are able to parse XHTML as XML.
Note (6): Internet Explorer 6 supports most properties of CSS2 but is known to have a significantly higher number of bugs than other browsers. The most notable of these is the box model bug, which affects all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows prior to IE6 and remains the default box model in IE6.
Note (7): Requires installation of extension and nightly browser dated after January 28 2005 [1] (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/).
Note (8): See Safari features (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/safari.html)
Protocol support
Information about what internet protocols the browsers support. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browser or extensions that provide such functionality.
Note (9): Internet Explorer has purposely avoided support for email, as email is entirely reserved for its mail-client counterpart Outlook Express, which is distributed in the same download package as IE.
Note (10): Mozilla Firefox has purposely avoided support for email and newsgroup, as these are entirely reserved for its mail-client counterpart Mozilla Thunderbird
Note (11): An extension exists that can add chat support: ChatZilla (https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows&id=16)
Note (12): Gopher is supported through proxy servers.
Image Format support
Information about what image formats the browsers support.
Note (13): Internet Explorer for Windows supports PNG images but is unable to correctly display images with alpha transparency; partially transparent pixels will be displayed as fully opaque. Internet Explorer for Macintosh supports PNGs with alpha transparency.
Note (14): Support of MNG/JNG was dropped since June 6 2003 [2] (http://www.mozilla.org/status/2003-06-06.html) [3] (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=12633).
Note (15): Requires SVG-enabled Mozilla/Firefox (not enabled in official builds) [4] (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/).
References
External links
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