TOP 5 WEB BROWSERS

Firefox 4 is Mozilla's latest web browser and was released on March 22, 2011. Plans for Firefox 4 were announced in a blog post by Mike Beltzner, Firefox director, in early May 2010. The first beta followed on July 6, 2010 and then the Release Candidate 2 (RC2) on March 18, 2011. Firefox 4 was code named "Tumucumaque" and will be Firefox's last large release cycle. Primary goals for this version were to improve performance, standards support and the user interface.

Firefox 4 is based on the Gecko 2.0 engine which supports HTML5, CSS3, WebM, and WebGL. It includes a new JavaScript engine and upgraded XPCOM APIs. The browser has a new audio application programming interface (API) which provides the ability to create or access audio data associated with HTML5 audio elements. Hardware acceleration is enabled by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines using Direct2D and on OS X using OpenGL. This feature allows the browser to make use of the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to make web pages appear faster.

New features introduced in Firefox 4 include improved "doorhanger" notifications, Firefox Panorama, application tabs, a redesigned extension manager, integration with Firefox Sync and support for multitouch displays. Changes to the user interface include merging the "stop," "reload," and "go" buttons into a single button; hiding the menu bar by default on select operating systems (i.e. Windows Vista and Windows 7) while moving common actions to a new "Firefox" menu located in the browser's top left corner; the possibility to add "app tabs" which give the user quick access to their favorite web apps; and the ability to customize the tab, bookmark and navigation bars. In addition, Firefox 4 contains support for the "Do not track" header for increased web privacy.

The Opera 11 web browser was released on December 16, 2010. New features include extensions, tab stacking, visual mouse gestures, safety improvements to the address field and a content blocker list that can now synchronize through Opera Link.

The Opera web browser started in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, the project resulted in the creation of a new company, Opera Software ASA. Up until version 2.0, the Opera browser was called MultiTorg Opera and was not available to the public. Online documents showed it at The Third International WWW Conference in 1995. It was known for its multiple document interface (MDI) and 'hotlist' (sidebar) as well as being the first browser to focus on adhering to the W3C standards. The first publicly available version was released in 1996.

Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. The name Chrome is a derivation of the frame, or "chrome", of the graphical user interface of web browsers. The first beta version was released for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008 and the public stable release followed on December 11, 2008. The browser aims to be secure, fast, simple and stable. In September 2008, Google released much of Chrome's source code as an open source project titled Chromium. Included in this code was Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, which Google hoped that other browsers would adopt to help improve web application performance. Giving third-party developers access to the source code enabled porting the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. The Google-authored portion of Chromium was released under the BSD license, allowing portions of the code to be incorporated into both open and closed source software, while other portions of the code are subject to various other types of open source licenses. The main differences between Chrome and Chromium are that Chromium lacks built-in automatic updates and Google branding. Google's Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was initially against the idea of building an independent web browser, but quickly changed his mind after co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired several Mozilla Firefox developers to build a demonstration of Chrome. Mr. Schmidt admitted that, "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind." As of January 2011, Chrome was the third most widely used web browser and had a worldwide usage share of more than 10%.

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and is included with the Mac OS X operating system. Safari 5 was released on June 7, 2010 and features the new Safari Reader, a 30 percent Javascript performance increase over Safari 4 and an additional search engine, Bing. This latest version also includes improved developer tools and support for more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies. Safari Extensions now allow developers to customize and enhance the browsing experience and Apple changed the position of the progress bar to behind the address bar. The update of Safari 5.0.1 enables the Extensions PrefPane by default.

The first version of Safari was released as a public beta on January 7, 2003. It became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the native browser for iOS. In June 2007, Apple released a version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Before then, Apple Macintosh computers featured only the Netscape Navigator and Cyberdog web browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac was later included as the default web browser for Mac OS 8.1 and onwards, as part of a five year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. During that agreement, Microsoft released three major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac that were bundled with Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, though Apple continued to include Netscape Navigator as an alternative. Microsoft followed with a Mac OS X edition of Internet Explorer 5, which was the default browser in all Mac OS X releases from Mac OS X DP4 through to OS X v10.2.

As of 2011, Safari is the fourth most widely used browser in the U.S. after Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome, respectively.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), the current version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, was released to the public on March 14, 2011. It features support for several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and has improved JavaScript performance. Other features include hardware-accelerated graphics rendering using Direct2D, hardware-accelerated text rendering using DirectWrite, hardware-accelerated video rendering using Media Foundation, imaging support provided by Windows Imaging Component, and high fidelity printing powered by the XPS print pipeline. Internet Explorer 9 also supports HTML5 video and audio tags and the Web Open Font Format.

Unlike previous versions, the release of Internet Explorer 9 was not tied to the release schedule of any particular version of Windows.