As of November 2008, total downloads surpassed 22.5 million.

Avant Browser is currently available in 41 languages.

Avant Browser was largely inspired by Opera, the first major browser to have a multiple document interface. The developer’s objective was to wrap a comparable interface around the layout engine used by Internet Explorer, thereby achieving Opera-like ergonomics without suffering the frequent problems that browser had rendering pages tested only in IE. In fact it was initially released under the name “IEopera”, though this was soon changed due to the obvious trademark issues.

Latterly, Avant’s developer Anderson Che has concentrated on adding user-requested features, and Avant was among the first browsers to have popup blocking, advertising server blocking, and one-click disabling of potential security vulnerabilities such as ActiveX, Java, and scripts.

In the Avant Browser, unlike most other “alternative” browsers, the default search engine is not Google. Instead it uses a version of the Yahoo! search engine, given a custom look and renamed Avantfind, and it is not immediately evident how to change it. However Google and many other search engines are available via the address bar “Quick Search” facility, and instructions on how to change the default to an engine of the user’s choice have been posted by the very active Avant Browser user community.

The community has also created other tools and extensions for Avant, including registry files which allow it to use the Information Bar and other security enhancements of XP SP2.

Alongside Avant, the developer has a sister project known as Orca Browser, an Avant-like shell of Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine as used in Firefox 3 and has similar approaches as Flock. It is in the final testing stage and a public release candidate version is available.

Other Information

• Developed by Avant Force
• Initial release 2004, 4–5 years ago
• Stable release 11.7 Build 19
• Preview release none (n/a) [+/−]
• OS Windows
• Type Web browser
• License Proprietary EULA
• Website http://www.avantbrowser.com

Download

On June 11, 2007, a version of Safari was released for the Microsoft Windows operating system, supporting both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Safari has a 7.13% market share as of November 2008

Features

Safari offers most features common to modern web browsers such as:

• Tabbed Browsing
• Bookmark Management
• A resizable web-search box in the toolbar which uses Google on the Mac and either Google or Yahoo! on Windows
• Pop-up ad blocking
• History and bookmark search
• text search
• Spell-checking
• Expandable text boxes
• Automatic filling in of web forms
• Built-in password management via Keychain
• Subscribing to and reading web feeds
• Quartz-style font-smoothing
• The Web Inspector, a DOM Inspector-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object Model of a web page

Other information

• Developed by Apple Inc.
• Initial release January 7, 2003
• Stable release 3.2.1
• Preview release 4.0 Developer Beta (Build 40A12) (22 August 2008; 120 days ago) [+/−]
• OS Mac OS X
• Microsoft Windows
• iPhone OS
• Development status Current
• Type Web browser
• License Proprietary. Engine under GNU LGPL
• Website apple.com/safari/

Try Safari Now

Google Chrome is a free web browser developed by Google that has about 1% share of browser market. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or “chrome”, of web browsers.

Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome, and is released under the BSD license. It implements the same feature set, but has a slightly different logo.

History

Announcement

The release announcement was originally scheduled for 3 September 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser. Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on 1 September 2008. Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books and their site and mentioned it on its official blog along with an explanation for the early release.

Other Information

• Developed by Google
• Initial release September 2, 2008 (2008-09-02)
• Stable release none (n/a) [+/−]
• Preview release 0.3.154.9 (30 October 2008; 10 days ago) [+/−]
• Written in C++ and Assembly
• OS Microsoft Windows (XP SP2 and Vista); Mac OS X and Linux in development.
• Size 8.43 MB[1]
• Available in 43 languages
• Development status Beta
• Type Web browser
• License Google Chrome Terms of Service (Google Chrome executable),
• BSD license (source code and Chromium executable)

Links

• Download Google Chrome
• Official Website

opera

Features of Opera include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing and malware protection, strong encryption when browsing secure web sites, and the ability to easily delete private data such as cookies and browsing history by simply clicking a button.

Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Though evaluations of Opera have been largely positive, Opera has captured only a fraction of the worldwide personal computer browser market. It is currently the fourth most widely used web browser for personal computers, behind Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Opera has a stronger market share, however, on mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal digital assistants. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices. In fact, approximately 40 million mobile phones have shipped with Opera pre-installed. Furthermore, Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems. Some television set-top boxes use Opera as well, and Adobe licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite.

History

Opera began in 1994 as a research project at Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. In 1995, it branched out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA. Opera was first released publicly with version 2.0 in 1996, which only ran on Microsoft Windows. In an attempt to capitalize on the emerging market for Internet-connected handheld devices, a project to port Opera to mobile device platforms was started in 1998. Opera 4.0, released in 2000, included a new cross-platform core that facilitated creation of editions of Opera for multiple operating systems and platforms.

Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. But version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it. Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera’s default search engine).

Among the new features introduced in version 9.1 (released in 2006) was fraud protection using technology from GeoTrust, a digital certificate provider, and PhishTank, an organization that tracks known phishing web sites. This feature was further improved and expanded in version 9.5, when GeoTrust was replaced with Netcraft, and malware protection from Haute Secure was added.

Also in 2006, editions of Opera were made and released for Nintendo’s DS and Wii gaming systems. Opera for the Wii, called the Internet Channel, was free to download from its release on April 12, 2007 until June 30, 2007. After June 30, Wii users had to pay 500 Wii Points (about US$5) to download it. The Nintendo DS Browser is likewise not free; it is sold as a physical DS game cartridge.

Download Opera

Opera Web Browser

firefox

To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine. Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, the most popular of which include the NoScript JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, FoxyTunes media player control toolbar, Adblock Plus ad blocking utility, StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! download enhancer and Web Developer toolbar.

Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.0.3, released on September 26, 2008. Firefox’s source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL

Mozilla Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox 2 is a version of Mozilla Firefox, a web browser released on October 24th 2006 by the Mozilla Corporation.

Firefox 2 uses version 1.8 of the Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The release contained many new features not found in Firefox 1.5, including improved support for SVG and JavaScript 1.7, as well as UI changes.

On March 22, 2006, the first alpha version of Firefox 2 (Bon Echo Alpha 1) was released. It featured Gecko 1.8.1 for the first time. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.x is the final version supported on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. Mac OS X 10.5 support was added October 18, 2007 with version 2.0.0.8 .

Firefox 2.0 featured updates to tabbed browsing environment, the extensions manager, the GUI, and the find, search and software update engines; a new session restore feature; inline spell checking; and an anti-phishing feature which was implemented by Google as an extension, and later merged into the program itself.

Mozilla is planning on ending support for Firefox 2 mid-December 2008.

Download Firefox 2.x.x

Mozilla Firefox 3

Mozilla Firefox 3 was released on June 17, 2008 by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox 3 uses version 1.9 of the Mozilla Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. The new version fixes many bugs, improves standard compliance, and implements new web APIs. Other new features include a redesigned download manager, a new “Places” system for storing bookmarks and history, and separate themes for different operating systems.

Development stretches back to the first Firefox 3 beta (under the codename ‘Gran Paradiso’) which had been released several months earlier on 19 November 2007, and was followed by several more beta releases in spring 2008 culminating in the June release.

Firefox 3 had 2.31% of the recorded usage share of web browsers by June 2008, and had over 8 million unique downloads the day it was released, setting a Guinness World Record.

Download Firefox 3.x.x

Firefox web browser

flock

Bloggers are a target audience for Flock, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox, because it has been designed to keep people up to date with news, blogs and when friends appear online.

Favourite websites can be kept up to date with other computers that a user may have access to by using the del.icio.us and shadows services. These websites can then be shared with other users,

Flock organises news from RSS feeds in a pane rather than as bookmarks. Each feed is checked for new stories hourly. Flock shows an incon in the address bar to show that a feed is available from that page. Simply click on that icon to sign up.

Flock can automatically add photos and snippets of other webpages to blogs written with Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and WordPress. A special web snippets bar has been added to store quotes from other websites. Users simply drag pictures onto the Photo icon to upload, or drag and drop images which are automatically stored on to a Flickr or PhotoBucket account.

Search with Flock is slightly different from other browsers because as text is typed in, Flock will start searching from the web as well as a user’s favourites and history. These initial results are shown in a drop down menu.

Note that this is the major release of v2 based on Firefox 3.

Links:

• Download
• Extensions
• Themes

Flock Browser – The Social Web Browser