Comparison of web browsers

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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.

[edit] Web browser history

[edit] Web browsers by year

A rough estimation of usage share by percent of layout engines/web browsers, see usage share of web browsers.

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.^[2]

See also: microbrowser

[edit] Historical web browsers

This table focuses on OS and browsers of the 1990s and turn of the century. The year listed for a version is usually the year of the first official release, with an end year being end of development, project change, or relevant termination. Releases of OS and browser from the early 1990s to before 2001-2002 time frame are the current focus.

Many early browsers can be made to run on later OS (and later browsers on early OS in some cases), however, most of these situations are avoided in the table. Terms are defined below

^{[6] [7]}

^ Cell phones, Symbian, Wii, Windows Mobile; BeOS (Dropped 3.62), QNX (Dropped 6.01)

[edit] General information

Basic general information about the browsers: creator/company, license/price etc.

• ^  There are five different products which all carry the name Netscape: Netscape versions 1 to 4, properly called Netscape Navigator, was a browser based on the original Netscape engine. Netscape 4 also was available as an Internet suite, properly called Netscape Communicator. Netscape 6 and 7 was a new Internet suite based on the Gecko engine and the Mozilla Application Suite user interface. Netscape 8, properly called Netscape Browser, is a new browser based on Firefox that can use both the Gecko (Firefox) and Trident (Internet Explorer) engines. Netscape resumed use of the Navigator name from Netscape Navigator 9.0 beta 1. See Netscape for more info.

[edit] Release history

A brief overview of the release history.