Top Web Browsers
We may define a web browser as a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. Further an information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) that may be a web page, image, video or other piece of content. Also the hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their web browsers to related resources.
We shall now discuss some of the popular web browsers in length.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google that serves as a platform for running web apps. Additionally, it is the default web browser on Android. However, Google releases the majority of Chrome’s source code as the Chromium open-source project. For this purpose, Chrome used the WebKit layout engine until version 27. With reference to version 28, all Chrome ports except the iOS port use Blink, a fork of the WebKit engine.
You should understand that chrome uses a process-allocation model to sandbox tabs, using the principle of least privilege. Such that each tab process cannot interact with critical memory functions or other tab processes. The Sandbox Team is said to have “taken this existing process boundary and made it into a jail”. This enforces a computer security model with two levels of multilevel security (user and sandbox).
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox (or simply Firefox) is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Wherein Firefox is available for Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems, with its Firefox for Android available for Android. It uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages to implement current and anticipated web standards. In which case, Firefox allows an open architecture which accepts the installation of themes and extensions.
Firefox implements many web standards, including HTML4 (almost full HTML5), XML, XHTML, MathML, SVG 2 (partial), CSS (with extensions), ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, XSLT, XPath, and APNG (Animated PNG) images with alpha transparency.
Opera Web Browser
Opera is a web browser for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems developed by Opera Software. It uses the Blink layout engine. Opera includes built-in tabbed browsing, a bookmarks bar, add-ons, and a download manager. Also, Opera has “Speed Dial” which permits the user to add an unlimited number of pages shown in thumbnail form in a page displayed when a new tab is opened. Speed Dial allows the user to more easily navigate to the selected web pages.
Safari Web Browser
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple based on the WebKit engine.It is the default browser on Apple devices. On macOS, Safari is a Cocoa application. It uses Apple’s WebKit for rendering web pages and running JavaScript. WebKit consists of WebCore (based on Konqueror’s KHTML engine) and JavaScriptCore (originally based on KDE’s JavaScript engine, named KJS). For his purpose, Apple maintains a plugin blacklist that it can remotely update to prevent potentially dangerous or vulnerable plug-ins from running on Safari. So far, Apple has blocked versions of Flash and Java.
Apple tracks use of the browser. Windows users may not opt out of tracking, since their license omits the opening If clause.
Internet Explorer (IE)
Internet Explorer formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer or Windows Internet Explorer was developed by Microsoft and included in the Microsoft Windows operating systems as a default web browser. Later, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Edge would replace Internet Explorer as the default browser on its Windows 10 devices. This effectively makes Internet Explorer 11 the last release. Further, the Internet Explorer, uses the Trident layout engine
Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between standards mode and a “quirks mode”. In which it deliberately mimics nonstandard behaviours of old versions of MSIE for HTML and CSS rendering on screen. It also provides its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript.
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge (codename “Spartan”) is a web browser developed by Microsoft, thereby replacing Internet Explorer as the default web browser on all device classes. However, Edge does not support ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects of Internet Explorer.
EdgeHTML is a proprietary layout engine developed for Edge. It is a fork of Trident that has removed all legacy code of older versions of Internet Explorer. Thereby, rewritten the majority of its source code to support web standards and interoperability with other modern browsers. EdgeHTML is written in C++. Also, EdgeHTML is meant to be fully compatible with the WebKit layout engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers.
