Window Managers for X

You are interested in open source web browsers and want to find out more about this topic? So take some time and have a look at this article within the website www.beryl-project.org. We will present you a variety of different open source web browsers and inform you about their features, functionalities, advantages and general popularity in the World Wide Web.

First of all we want to give you an understandable and clear definition of the term ‘web browser’. Strictly speaking a web browser represents a useful software application which can generally be used for collecting, presenting as well as passing through information and data on the World Wide Web. When talking about information, data and information resources within the World Wide Web it is actually referred to images, photos, music files, videos, web pages and other types of content.

Windows Internet Explorer, which was formerly known under the name of Microsoft Internet Explorer, represents a set of so-called graphical web browsers. Fact is that up to know Internet Explorer as well as its further developed versions such as amongst others Internet Explorer 1, Internet Explorer 2, Internet Explorer 3, Internet Explorer 4, Internet Explorer 5, and so on – up to its latest stable release, which is known as Internet Explorer 9, are the most popular and also most widely used web browsers since the year 1999. Strictly speaking, in 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 5 as well as Internet Explorer 6 succeeded in achieving a remarkable usage share of about 95 per cent. In 2011, its usage share unfortunately dropped to 40.9 per cent. The reason for this decline consists in the fact that in the last few years a variety of other web browsers such as for instance Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari have become very popular.

Considering browsing in the World Wide Web, nowadays most people do generally use free and open source web browsers such as Firefox or Opera. The reason for their popularity consists in the fact that both Firefox and Opera are characterized to have a remarkable speed, stability, security and attractive as well as very useful features, also called add-ons. Especially Firefox is extremely well known for its wide range of different add-ons: amazon.at addon, Firebug, tabbed browsing, live bookmarking, themes for changing the appearance of Firefox as well as language packs (the add-on is called ‘spell checking’). Furthermore Firefox makes it possible to install a variety of different extensions such as amongst others …

• … AniWeather: AniWeather presents a graphical weather report that is generally based on data from weather.com and weather.gov.
• … Google Earth: The Google integration called ‘Google Earth’ represents a so-called virtual globe or map that can be fully integrated into Firefox.
• … Breakpad: Breakpad represents a crash reporting system which means that it transfers any crashes of Firefox directly to Mozilla.
• … Firebug: Firebug represents a so-called web development tool that enables the user or web developer to debug, modify or edit CSS, HTML or other source codes of a website.