Web browsers are an essential part of every-day life now. How often are you using web browsers everyday? Whether for personal or business use, chances are you spend a good portion of your day on your browser. Everyone has their favorites. Do you download a specific browser on every machine that you use, or are you content using your the browser pre-installed on your computer? Are you wondering if you can transfer bookmarks over, browse or load pages faster? The only way to figure out which one is right for you is a little research and a little trial-and-error. We have collected some of that information here for you. So check out the top browsers list as compiled by us.
Firefox
Mozilla’s Firefox is a free and open source browser, originating with the Mozilla Application Suite. Current estimates show a 25% use rate amongst web browsers, and this is without any bundling like competitor products. The software is available for Linux, Mac and Windows systems amongst others. Firefox is listed as an open source software project, meaning that it’s source code is freely available. What this means is that anyone can view, modify or re-distribute the code. This resulted in notable releases such as Flock, Miro and Netscape (under the AOL banner). Firefox continues to gain market share and improve with more than 350 million users as of Mar. 2010
Chrome
Despite its on-going partnership with Mozilla’s Firefox, Google released their first public stable release of their web browser Chrome in late 2008. It’s speed as well as the Google brand quickly allowed it to become the 3rd most used browser with a slightly larger than 7% market share. Chrome is partially open source and is assemble from various Google code bases and several third parties. With its 5.0 release in May 2010, Chrome is now stable with Windows, Max and Linux systems.
Internet Explorer
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the most widely used web browser (Since 1999) with a market share between 50% and 60%. This number is on the decline as the majority of use comes from it being built-in to most Windows releases, and as newer competitors arrive on the web browsing scene. Due to forced usage and virus vulnerabilities with the ActiveX protocol it has received some bad press. Microsoft has sought to remedy this with the latest features and upgrades in Internet Explorer 8.
Safari
Safari began its life as a Mac exclusive software being developed by Apple and first included with OS X operating system. Safari is also the native browser for the iPhone, and as of June 11 officially can work on a Windows-based machine. It is the fourth most-used browser at this time. Safari is currently in it’s fourth major revision cycle as of June 2009 and features many JavaScript handling performance updates as well as a crash-resistance feature that keeps the browsing running despite any crashes from plug-ins on other tabs.
Opera
Opera had its first public release with version 2 in 1996, and only ran on MS Windows systems. Opera was one of the first major browsers to support mobile devices and one of the first to make use of tabbed browsing, followed quickly by Mozilla. Opera went cross platform in 2000, which also saw the end of the trial system which required users to pay after an initial testing period. Opera has claimed the speed crown at various times during the browsers wars and continues to focus on this aspect as they continue development, currently in the 10.0 revision series. Opera is the feature browser on web-capable Nintendo systems.
Tags: Browsing Software, Web Browsers, Web Browsing Applications, Web Browsing Software