This is a comparison of both historical and current web browsers based on developer, engine, platform(s), releases, license, and cost.
General information
Basic general information about the browsers. Browsers listed on a light purple background are discontinued. Platforms with a yellow background have limited support.
^Chromium, on which Google Chrome is based, is open source; the features Google adds to Chrome (such as H.264 and ACC decoding, built-in Adobe Flash, and an auto-updater system, among other things) are closed-source. See Chromium (web browser) § Differences from Google Chrome and Google Chrome's Terms of Service for more info.[12]
^Chromium, on which Microsoft Edge is based, is open source; the features Microsoft adds to Edge are closed-source. See Chromium (web browser) for more info.
^ abcdeThere are five different products which all carry the name Netscape: Netscape versions 1 to 4, properly called Netscape Navigator, was a browser based on the original Netscape engine. Netscape 4 also was available as an Internet suite, properly called Netscape Communicator. Netscape 6 and 7 was a new Internet suite based on the Gecko engine and the Mozilla Application Suite user interface. Netscape 8, properly called Netscape Browser, was a distinct browser based on Firefox that could use either the Gecko (Firefox) or Trident (Internet Explorer) engine. Netscape resumed use of the Navigator name from Netscape Navigator 9.0 beta 1. See Netscape for more info.
This list is not exhaustive, but rather reflects the most common OSes today (e.g. Netscape Navigator was also developed for OS/2 at a time when macOS 10 did not exist) but does not include the growing appliance segment (for example, the Opera web browser has gained a leading role for use in mobile phones, smartphones, the Nintendo DS and Wii, and Personal Digital Assistants, and is also used in some smart TVs).
Both the web browser and OS means most recent version, example: Windows 11 with Internet Explorer 11.
^Starting with version 4, Google Chrome can disable Cookies, Images, JavaScript, Plugins, Popups, and Geolocation individually.
^ abcLacks search toolbar, but search URL autocompletion provided via addressbar.
^ abThere is no online update facility built into IE, but it gets updated by Windows Update when enabled. As of Version 10 automatic silent update is the default setting in Internet Explorer. In Microsoft Edge, the option to disable automatic updates via the about dialog is not included.
^Available as a PIM plugin which is disabled by default, but it is part of default installation.
^ abThrough the Privacy toolbar, K-Meleon Versions 1.5 and 1.6, can individually disable Cookies, Images, JavaScript, Popups, and Plugins (e.g. Flash and Java).
^For the download manager kdenetwork needs to be installed.
^ abcDepending on user's choice of rendering engine.
^Lynx is able to edit text with an external editor, which can provide spell checking.
^OmniWeb supports per-domain settings of options including support for disabling scripting, ad blocking, java and cookies. These settings only work on top level domains.[91]
^Opera versions before 15 had bookmarks. Newer Opera versions use a different concept called "Stash" instead.
^Opera can auto-complete forms with your personal information and website usernames. Also there is extension AutoCompleteArchived 25 July 2014 at the Wayback Machine which can complete forms with form history.
^ abDevelopers distribute patch enabling this functionality.
^This functionality is handled via third-party software by browser's design.
^ abThis browser allows choosing a custom cookie jar, making cookies from other sessions unavailable to new session.
^In many integrated password saving tools there are often leaks that make them unsafe.[92]
Accessibility features
Information about what common accessibility features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons). Browsers that do not support pop-ups have no need for pop-up blocking abilities, so that field is marked as N/A.
^The option "Do not allow any site to show pop-ups" in Google Chrome, which is the default, actually allows sites to show pop-ups which are not considered harmful.
^Feature was intentionally removed via regular patch update, due to poor impact on performance.
^Ad filter support can be added by installing an extension such as AdSweep, AdThwart or Adblock Plus.
^ abcAlthough text browsers don't have dialog windows, their prompts behave as modal dialogs – block the input until answer is received.
^Requires building with "NONBLOCK_JS_DIALOGS" compile flag enabled; may cause crashes: [1].
^ abcdefgMost Gecko browsers have options to block chosen images and cookies. Extended Ad filter support can be added by installing an extension such as Adblock Plus.
^Font smoothing or font rasterization is arguably an accessibility feature affecting how the fonts are rendered and font readability. Also referred as ClearType or TrueType
^ abcOn Mac systems, gestures are available systemwide via multitouch sensing on trackpads and mice.
^ abcdOn macOS, text-to speech and speech recognition are available systemwide and is available from menu in native Cocoa browsers.
^ abcdefGoogle Chrome can be given these features using extensions like smooth gestures, speechify and voice control for google chrome.
^ abTTS in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge is available through the operating system Speech API. For TTS, SAPI takes text as input and uses the TTS engine to output that text as spoken audio. This is the same technology used by the Windows accessibility tool, Narrator. SAPI and an English TTS engine have been embedded in all Windows operating systems since the release of Windows XP.
^ abInternet Explorer and Microsoft Edge can be controlled by applications which use the operating system Speech API. A built-in application called Windows Speech Recognition ships with Windows Vista and later client versions.
^On macOS systems, caret navigation (called "Full Keyboard Access") can be enabled systemwide.
^Mouse gesture support can be added by installing extensions like Mouse Gestures Suite (Seamonkey-only) [5].
Web technology support
Information about what web standards, and technologies the browsers support, except for JavaScript. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality.
^ abCSS 2, a W3C recommendation since 1998, is the current stable version of CSS, nevertheless, CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS 2. Conformance criteria are detailed at the W3C website. (CSS 3 is only in draft status at present.) For more detailed information please see comparison of layout engines (CSS).
^ abLINK as a navigational aid, as distinct from non-navigational uses of LINK.
^ abXHTML 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).
^Microsoft claims Internet Explorer 8 has full CSS2.1 support,[101] however independent testing revealed several bugs.[102]
^ abcDepends on the layout engine which is chosen: Trident or Gecko or WebKit.
^ abcDepends on the layout engine which is chosen: Trident or Gecko.
Plugins and syndicated content 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.
^ abcdInternet Explorer (and Shells) is the only browser to natively support the Component Object Model (popularly known as ActiveX). Most other browsers use the NPAPI plugin architecture. ActiveX is more powerful than NPAPI in terms of the control it affords over the browser, but it is specific to Windows whereas NPAPI is cross-platform. There is a third-party plugin that adds partial ActiveX support, that is available for certain older versions of Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape Navigator. The default settings in earlier versions of Internet Explorer allowed the automatic download, installation, and running of new ActiveX controls with minimal user intervention – this made it possible to use ActiveX on web pages to install viruses, spyware, etc. onto a user's computer.
^ abJava support is for built-in support by the browser without a plugin.
^ abNPAPI and the Java-plugin were disabled by default in Chrome versions 42 and not supported in Chrome versions 45 and higher.
^ abRSS and ATOM feed autodetection in Epiphany depends on the Newsfeed extension which is included with Epiphany-extensions.
^Internet Explorer did for a time support NPAPI plugins. Plugins that functioned in the Netscape browser also functioned in Internet Explorer. This was due to a small ActiveX control implemented within a "plugin.ocx" file that acted as a shim between the ActiveX based browser and the NPAPI plugin. The IE browser would load the control and use it to host plugins specified within the page. However, Microsoft made the claim that the NPAPI plugins (or the IE implementation of the API) were a security issue and dropped support for them in version 5.5 SP2.[105][106][107]
^Internet Explorer 8 supports syndicated content in hAtom / hSlice microformat by the name of a feature known as Web Slices. Internet Explorer 4.0—7 supported CDF.
^ abRSS and ATOM feed autodetection in Konqueror depends on the aKregator package which is installed with kdepim.
^Safari had Java only on macOS, up to Safari 11. No longer supported Safari for Windows needed a plugin.
^Safari has Gears only on Mac OS X 10.4+. Windows is not supported.
JavaScript support
Information about what JavaScript technologies the browsers support. Note that although XPath is used by XSLT, it is only considered here if it can be accessed using JavaScript. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality, e.g., Babel.
^ abcIt is possible to compile Amaya with JavaScript enabled, using the CVS version and SpiderMonkey. However, this is still experimental and only a small subset of DOM 1 is available.
^ abcdefghijklXPath is a part of DOM 3, but is considered separately here. A large subset of DOM 3 is accessible by extensions but not by websites.
Information about what Internet protocols the browsers support (in addition to HTTP that all (modern) browser should and do fully support[a]). External links lead to information about support in future versions of the browsers or extensions that provide such functionality.
More than half of web traffic from Chrome to Google's servers is handled by QUIC protocol, not TCP (or HTTP/1). Chrome, Opera, and Firefox have support for QUIC, and HTTP/3, while Safari is testing it for a subset of users.
^Mosaic reached only HTTP 0.9 compliance, and does not support secure communications in any way.
^ abMany browsers have FTP support as read-only and have no upload capitilies. Read-only is marked as yes. For a comparison of clients that support upload opportunities see Comparison of FTP client software.
^Firefox support for the Gopher protocol was dropped in Firefox 4 (Gecko 1.9.3) per bug 388195.[111] This and newer versions have full Gopher support when the OverbiteFF extension is installed.
^Microsoft has limited support to certain "non-navigable" content, such as in <img> tags and CSS rules, for security reasons, including concerns that JavaScript embedded in a data URI may not be interpretable by script filters such as those used by web-based email clients.[116]
^Konqueror has full Gopher support when the kgopher KIO plugin is installed.
^ abcDepends on the layout engine which is chosen: Trident or Gecko.
^ abBehavior towards malicious certificates can only be set up in compile time.
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.
^ abAlthough it was one of the first suggested WWW image formats, most browsers support TIFF by using a plugin installed by the user instead of decoding it natively.
^ abSVG 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.
^ abMost browsers support PDF by installing an Adobe 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 <img/> 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 and bitmap graphics, audio, video, forms, intra- and inter-document hypertext links and a hierarchical contents listing. The format is also the native display format under macOS.
^ abInternet Explorer supports PNG images but is unable to correctly display images with gamma correction or color correction.[citation needed] Versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 7 are unable to correctly display images with alpha channel (for transparency) without additional coding [9].
^ abSupport for the canvas element was added to Internet Explorer 9. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer can be made to emulate canvas using the excanvas script.
^ abcInternet Explorer support for XBM files was removed in Version 6.
^ abcdFirefox and SeaMonkey partially support SVG 1.1 Full. Modules that are implemented or not implemented and details of their implementation: [10].
^ abcFor Chromium prior to version 59 there is support via an extension.
^Falkon supports as much SVG specification as WebKit does: [11].
^In Gecko 1.9.2 (Firefox 3.6) XBM support was dropped.
^Konqueror supports JPEG2000 if KDE's viewer is compiled with Jasper library.
^Inline PDF viewing in Konqueror requires KPDF which is included in kdegraphics.
^ abWhile lacking support for inline display of graphical elements, Lynx allows defining standalone image viewer and assigning programs to MIME types. Such program is called when user activates corresponding element, effectively allowing Lynx user to add support for arbitrary non-inlined file format.
^ abSafari 3 is able to render SVG documents, but not fully.[127]
^Depends on the layout engine which is chosen: Trident or Gecko.
^Pale Moon supports JPEG-XR from the first quarter of 2017. [13]
^Safari support for HEIF pronounced in 2017 from version 11 on operating systems macOS Sierra and iOS 11. [14]
^With the addition of the new Cairo version in Gecko 1.9 it will be natively possible to save pages to PDFs but not read them. This feature is not included in Firefox 3.5, however it is possible with the new Cairo backend.
Internationalization
Most browsers are available in more than one language.
English (en), French (fr), Finnish (fi), German (de), Italian (it), Portuguese (pt), Russian (ru), Spanish (es), Chinese (zh-CN and zh-TW), Turkish (tr), Slovak (sk), Russian (ru), Norwegian (no), Georgian (ka), Japanese (ja), Hungarian (hu), Dutch (du), Ukrainian (uk)
Chinese (zh-CN, zh-TW), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Lithuanian (lt), Norwegian (nb, and nn), Portuguese (pt), Slovak (sk), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv)
Arabic (ar), Basque (eu), Bulgarian (bg), Catalan (ca), Chinese (zh-CN, zh-TW), Croatian (hr), Czech (cz), Dutch (nl), English (en), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Galician (gl), Ganda (lg), Georgian (ka), German (de), Greek (el), Hebrew (he), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Latvian (lv), N'ko (nqo), Persian (fa), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt-BR, and pt-PT), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru), Serbian (sr), Slovak (sk), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), Uzbek (uz)
Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh-CN, zh-TW), English (en), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Georgian (ka), German (de), Hungarian (hu), Korean (ko), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt-PT), Russian (ru), Slovak (sk), Spanish (es-AR, and es-ES)
Catalan (ca), Czech (cs), Danish (da), German (de), Estonian (et), English (en), French (fr), Hungarian (hu), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Dutch (nl), Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR), Russian (ru), Kinyarwanda (rw), Slovenian (sl), Swedish (sv), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Chinese (zh-CN, zh-TW)
Portuguese (pt-BR), Chinese (zh), Czech (cs), English (en), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), French (fr), German (de), Greek (el), Hungarian (hu), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Russian (ru), Slovenian (sl), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv), Turkish (tr)
Arabic (ar), Bulgarian (bg), Traditional Chinese (zh-TW), Simplified Chinese (zh-CN), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), American English (en-US), British English (en-GB), Filipino (tl), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Galician (gl), Greek (el), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Icelandic (is), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Polish (pl), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), European Portuguese (pt-PT), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru) Argentine Spanish (es-AR), Mexican Spanish (es-M), Serbian [Cyrillic] (sr), Castilian Spanish (es-ES), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Swedish (sv-SE), Thai (th), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk)
Catalan (ca), Dutch (nl), English (en), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Spanish (es), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Korean (ko), Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt), Russian (ru), Swedish (sv), Chinese (zh)
Chinese (zh-CN, zh-TW), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), English (en), Finnish (fi), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Korean (ko), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Slovak (sk), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv)
