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Comparison of web browsers

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.

  • There are three different products which all carry the name Netscape: Netscape versions 1 through 4, properly called Netscape Navigator , was based on the original Netscape engine. Netscape 6 and 7 was a new browser based on the Gecko/Mozilla engine. Netscape 8, properly called Netscape Browser , is a new browser with two rendering engines: both the Gecko (Mozilla) and Trident (Internet Explorer) engine can be used. See Netscape for more info.
  • Although it can be downloaded freely, buying the underlying operating system includes fees which pay for it.

    • =Release history=

    A brief overview of the release history.

  • As of August 2004, at least Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 is required to install the latest version of Internet Explorer for Windows. Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 is the last version that still works with Windows 98, Windows ME, Window NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
  • Mac OS X v10.4 is required to install the latest version of Safari.

    • =Operating system support=

    The operating systems the browsers can run on without emulation. The term Dropped means that the latest stable version of the browser does not work on the operating system without emulation, although an older version is available that does . For dropped OSes, the version number in parentheses is the last stable version that ran on the OS.

    =Browser features=

    Information about what common browser features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons).

  • Internet Explorer is the only browser to support the Component Object Model (popularly known 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.
  • Spell checking can be added by installing an add-on like [http://www.iespell.com ieSpell].
  • Implemented in Internet Explorer 7.
  • For the download manager kdenetwork needs to be installed.
  • Spell checking can be added by installing an extension like the open source [http://spellbound.sourceforge.net Spellbound].
  • Spell checking requires Aspell to be installed.

    • =Accessibility features=

    Information about what common accessibility features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons).

  • Page zooming is different from text resizing, as it resizes not only characters, but also multimedia objects and viewport.
  • K-Meleon, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, and SeaMonkey support simple domain name-based blocking for images. More advanced regular expression-based Ad filtering for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox can be added with external software such as the AdBlock extension [http://adblock.mozdev.org].
  • Opera supports Wildcard_character Protocol_(computing)/domain/path and filetype blocking using a filter.ini [http://www.schrode.net/opera/url_filtering/] file. More advanced Ad filtering for Opera can also be done with external software [http://nontroppo.org/wiki/OperaAdblock].
  • All Mac OS X v10.4 applications have page-zooming available if system preferences are modified manually or with a separately installed application.
  • Ad filtering will be present in the upcoming KDE 3.5 and is already present in the KDE 3.5 Alpha 1 testing release.
  • Tabbed browsing and Page Zooming available only in Internet Explorer 7.
  • Tabbed browsing turned off by default in Safari.
  • Plug-in Available.

    • =Accessibility features (cont.)=

    Information about what common accessibility features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons).

  • Mouse gesture support can be added by installing extenstions like CocoaGestures (works with Cocoa applications)
  • Text-to speech is available system-wide and is available from menu in web browsers.
  • Mouse gesture support is available system-wide in KDE
  • Text-to speech support depends on the kttsd application in the kdeaccessibility package
  • Mouse gesture support can be added by installing Easy Go Back add-on [http://www.unhsolutions.net/EGB/] or similar applications.
  • Doug Turner, the Minimo lead developer, has introduced spatial navigation to some special Firefox builds [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007992.html]. It may build as a default part of Firefox [http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/snav/].
  • Mouse gesture support can be added by installing extensions like All-in-One Gestures (Firefox-only) [http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/ext/extensions-en.html] and Mouse Gestures [http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/index.html].
  • Firefox works with a number of screen readers such as JAWS [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/s2s/latest/jaws1/home/index.shtml] and Microsoft SAPI 5 TTS [https://webspace.utexas.edu/chencl1/clc-4-tts/] through extensions.

    • = Web technology support =

    Information about what web standards, and technologies the browsers support. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality.

  • CSS2 Revision 1, a World Wide Web Consortium candidate recommendation, is the current version of CSS. CSS2 aural media is almost universally unsupported and as such is not considered here. CSS3 is only in draft status at present. For more detailed information please see comparison of layout engines (CSS).
  • 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. For more detailed information please see comparison of layout engines (XHTML).
  • Dillo displays frames as links that the user can click on.
  • Internet Explorer 6 supports a number of selectors and properties of CSS2 but is known to have a significantly higher number of bugs than other browsers. The most notable of these is the Internet Explorer box model bug, which affects all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows prior to IE6 and remains the default box model in IE6.
    • *Internet Explorer 7 only
  • XForms is supported experimentally in nightly builds dated after January 28 2005 [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/]. Requires installation of an extension.
  • RSS and ATOM feed autodetection in Konqueror depends on the aKregator package which is installed with kdepim.

    • = Protocol support =

    Information about what internet protocols the browsers support. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality.

  • Many browsers have purposely avoided support for email and newsgroups, as these are reserved for their mail-client counterparts. For a comparison of such counterparts see comparison of email clients.
  • IRC support can added by installing ChatZilla.
  • Gopher is supported through proxy servers.
  • IDN support can be added by installing [http://idn.verisign-grs.com VeriSign i-Nav Plug-In].
  • IDN domains are displayed as punycode by default for security reasons
  • Only with the SSL dll version.
  • Konqueror has full Gopher support when the kgopher KIO plugin is installed.

    • =Image format support=

    Information about what image formats the browsers support. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality.

  • Internet Explorer does not support progressive display of progressive JPEG.
  • Internet Explorer supports PNG images but is unable to correctly display images with alpha compositing (for transparency), gamma correction and color correction. Alpha channel is said to be supported in version 7 [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx].
  • Support of MNG/JNG was dropped since June 6 2003 [http://www.mozilla.org/status/2003-06-06.html] [http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.phpt=12633]. There are unofficial builds with MNG/JNG called Mngzilla [http://mngzilla.sourceforge.net].
  • Most browsers support Tagged Image File Format by using a plugin installed by the user.
  • SVG here refers to SVG 1.1 Full. There are also two simplified profiles known as SVG 1.1 Tiny and SVG 1.1 Basic, which are intended for user agents with limited capabilities.
  • KDE has developed its own SVG plugin for Konqueror, known as KSVG [http://svg.kde.org]. KSVG1 development has ended, but work on the next-generation kdom-based KSVG2 has been very active [http://svg.kde.org/news.php#itemKVSG2KDOMKCanvasStatus]. KSVG2 is slated to be moved into the core KDE [http://dot.kde.org/1121021917/] meaning at some point KSVG2 should become part of Konqueror.
  • Firefox 1.5 supports SVG (Alphas and Betas currently released) [http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.5beta2.html]. Modules that are supported, in progress, or not supported [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status-ff15.html].
  • KSVG2 has been ported into Safari s WebKit, meaning that eventually SVG will make its way into Safari [http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/p=7].
  • Most browsers support Portable Document Format by installing an Adobe Systems plugin which takes over the browser window. Listed here are browsers which also support inline PDFs within other Hypertext documents (such as within HTML s tag). Note that PDF (in strictly speaking) is not an image format, but a scriptable rich text document format that can contain different types of multimedia content, including vector graphics and raster graphics graphics, audio, video, forms, intra- and inter-document hypertext links and a hierarchical contents listing. The format is also the native display format under Mac OS X.
  • Inline PDF viewing in Konqueror requires KPDF which is included in kdegraphics.

    • =Internationalization=

    Most browsers are available in more than one language.

    =Vulnerabilities=

    This comparison of unpatched publicly known vulnerabilities in latest stable version browsers is based on vulnerabilities reports by [http://www.securityfocus.com/ SecurityFocus] and [http://secunia.com/ Secunia]. See Computer security#unpatched for more details about the importance of unpatched known flaws.

    =References=

    *[http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/New.html Amaya release history] *[http://www.caminobrowser.org/releases/084.html Camino 0.8.4 release notes] *[http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/news.html Epiphany News] *[http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.0.7.html Firefox 1.0.7 release notes] *[http://icab.de/info.html iCab Information] *[http://www.konqueror.org/news.php Konqueror news] *[http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7.11/ Mozilla 1.7.11 release notes] *[http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/support/relnotes.jsp Netscape Browser release notes] *[http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/ Opera changelogs] *[http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html Information on WorldWideWeb] *[http://www.dillo.org/ChangeLog.html Dillo changelog] *[http://ieblog.com Internet Explorer 7 Team blog]

    =See also=

    *List of web browsers *Comparison of layout engines