more about Internet Browsers

[al-Sagar]

For some reason i need to run three four different browsers in my Laptop. so i searched for different browsers and downloaded. but in the end this is what i found.

for using in Windows platform there are very few basic Internet Browser engines.

1. IE
2. Netscape
3. Opera
4. Mozilla Firefox
5. Chrome
6. Apple Safari

the rest of the browsers i found were mainly ... ...

- browsers based on IE engine. they share the same basic settings of IE of the PC and most them pre-requisites IE in the PC. even when u turn them on u will find all ur IE bookmarks and saved passwords.

- some are based on mozilla or chrome engine. they are based on the original souce of mozilla or chrome but carries extra addons features.

- i did not find any browser who are based on opera or netscape.

- there was one browser which claims user can alternately Switch from IE, firefox or chrome engine.

ANYWAY I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW is the any else BASIC BROWSER which do not use engine of the 6 browsers i mentioned above ??? also i would prefer them to be tiny and slim.

[Zunaid]

Actually, Netscape and Firefox are cousins. From Netscape, we got the Mozilla engine which then morphed to Gecko which forms the core of Firefox as well as Thunderbird (email client) and Seamonkey (internet suite).

Both Apple Safari and Google Chrome is based on the WebKit engine - which was derived from an open source engine created by KDE (who built the Konquerer web browser)

Opera has it's own proprietary (not open source) engine which it has licensed to some others (Nintendo DSi Browser), Wii etc.

IE's browser engine is called Trident which is also used in Outlook, RealPlayer etc.

Both Chrome and Firefox has plug-ins that you can use to load in and render a page using the IE engine. There are still some websites that use non standard IE to render (many of our Bangla sites are still like that, for example BangladesherKhela.com while others have moved on to Unicode based rendering that ALL browser engines now support).

Maxthon is an interesting one. Fairly fast and uses BOTH the Trident and WebKit engine and work is going on to also integrate the Gecko engine.

You'll also have different custom browsers for the dcifferent OSs. For example, you have Avant or Blazer for Windows.

In Linux, Konqueror (see above) was very popular.

For Macs you have Camino and OmniWeb.

My own laptop is dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and we also have a couple of MacBook pros in the house - and I have personally played with many different browsers. A specific interest is in determining standards compliance and support for accessing by people with disabilities (thsi goes way back during my PhD research days in the mid 90s).

[al-Sagar]

thanks for the very useful informations