As we all know that Netscape is the second company to attempt to capitalize over the World Wide Web. It was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the first browser war. By the end of 2006, the usage share of Netscape browsers had fallen, from over 90% in the mid 1990s, to less than 1%. Netscape developed the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol (SSL) for securing online communication, which is still widely used,
as well as JavaScript, the most widely-used language for client-side scripting of web pages.
We all think that the death of the Netscape on its war against the Microsoft's web browser, "Internet Explorer" was the end of the world wide web browser's war. But it's not, the lost of Netscape was the gateway for a big war against the newly existing internet browsers at this time.
There are many web browsers attempting to destroy the camp of Microsoft on its Internet Explorer. There are Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and many more. They have stable releases that became popular on internet via computer or even in cellular phones.
The question is, what are their edge against their competitors? Is it their add-ons applications? Is it their speed capacity? We must compare them to each other so that we can distinguish how useful are they?
Let's first see Microsoft's Internet Explorer
Microsoft took five years sacrifices to bury Netscape under the ground. During their domination, The IE team went back to the drawing board and totally reworked the browser's rendering engine, also adding tabbed browsing and add-ons to the mix, and then finished it off with a facelift. That is their stable release the Internet Explorer 7.
After 7, it should be 8 of course! So Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 that's because Microsoft is putting a much greater focus on becoming web standards-compliant.
The Firefox
Enough so that when Mozilla announced it would be releasing Firefox 3, end users lined up to download the new version that time, promptly setting a Guinness World Record for most number of software downloads in 24 hours. And rightly so. Better memory management, improved security, an aptly named AwesomeBar, and several other improvements made the best browser on the market even better.
In line with the war, they released Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta 2.Initially intended as a 'fast-track' update to Firefox 3.0, lingering bugs in 3.1's new JavaScript engine, called TraceMonkey, likely means IE8 will ship first. And that's okay with Mozilla, who contends that its much more concerned with getting the new browser right than it is with beating Microsoft to the punch.
Opera
Diehard Opera fans might take exception to referring to Opera as an alternative browser, and with the release of 9.6, they have a point. Several speed enhancements made the already fast browser even snappier, but our favorite feature is the new magazine-style RSS feeds on its Opera 9.6 version.
They will not let others win the war, so they released the Opera 10 Alpha. The only browser of the bunch to be in a pre-beta state, we include it here because it's one of the first browsers to fully comply with the Acid3 test with a 100 percent pass rate (Safari 4 being the other). If the new build can live up to its promise of a 30 percent performance boost, Opera may finally find its way onto more mainstream machines.
Safari
Apple's DNA is evident in its Safari browser right from the get-go. Hardly surprising given that it began life on the Mac OS X operating system in early 2003. In the summer of 2007, Safari shed its Mac-only shackles and surfed over to Windows with claims of performing up to twice as fast as the competition. Soon to be old news, Apple is gearing up to replace Safari 3 with a significantly faster fourth version.
Safari must looked high with its recently released version, new Safari 4 browser is up to 4 times faster than the previous version, and according to its own testing, it destroys the competition when it comes to JavaScript performance. A redesigned UI and a smorgasbord of added features makes Safari 4 Apple's most ambitious browser to date.
Google Chrome 1.0
This is the new character on the war. When Google surprised everyone when its Chrome browser showed up on the web unannounced, and while there's clearly much work to be done, it's hard not to get excited over better tab management. Chrome treats each tab as its own process, so if there's a bug in a website's code that causes a crash, you only lose a single tab and not the entire browser.
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