The browser wars - we all know the heavyweights, Internet Explorer on Windows, Safari on the Apple, and Firefox on Unix and crossing to Windows at a rapid pace. But amid all the sound and fury about which browser you use (and really, who cares? hello, they’re all free?), you probably don’t encounter the other contenders, unless you run a website. There, looking at your server logs, will be a dozen or so web browsers that you don’t even recognize. So what are they like?

Konqueror

http://www.konqueror.org/

Konqueror is the default web browser for the KDE environment, which is itself very popular on Linux, BSD, and all Unix systems. Konqueror is very much influenced by the Microsoft Explorer idea, which is fitting considering KDE is itself made so Windows users feel at home. So Konqueror is a web browser, editor, file manager, file viewer, and more. Konqueror uses its own rendering engine, named KHTML. It is limited to running in Unix environments.

Seamonkey

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Seamonkey is an old friend under a familiar name; it is the modern incarnation of Mozilla, which is also the browser that seeded Firefox. So Seamonkey is a distant cousin to Firefox, working mostly like Mozilla, including the built-in editor, built-in IRC chat, and cross-platform capability. Contrary to the press, Seamonkey does not run the Gecko rendering engine but rather the NGLayout one. Firefox has used Gecko in the past, but will be moving to Cairo. You only care about this stuff if you edit web pages.

Opera

http://www.opera.com/

Opera is very close to being the fourth major browser, and you don’t know the meaning of elite until you’ve talked to an Opera fan. Their browser is so perfect, it was the only one to pass the ACID2 test for years until Firefox finally caught up. I know - big whoopie, but if you’re in the presence of an Opera user, act impressed by that fact. Its engine is Presto, and it is cross-platform to just about anything with a microchip in it, including smart-phones, PDAs, and the Nintendo DS. The only downside is that its license is proprietary, even though they give it away for free.

Epiphany

http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/

Epiphany is to the Gnome desktop as Konqueror is to the KDE desktop. Epiphany is derived from the original Galeon web browser, and so web masters will see it pop up in browser stats under that name. Epiphany runs only on Unix-like systems, and uses the same rendering engine as Firefox (Gecko, currently). It also has a few extra features, such as tagged bookmarks; this allows the same web link to be stored under multiple categories in your bookmarks menu. On the whole, if it looks good in Firefox, it looks good in Epiphany too.

W3M

http://sourceforge.net/projects/w3m/

You’ve heard of Lynx, a text-based browser which is bot-capable (meaning a program can browser with it), and also be used by the handicapped (such as screen-readers for the blind). But what’s up with a text-based web browser that supports images? In fact, W3M can handle cookies, bookmarks, and almost anything up to Javascript. The screen shot here is running in a transparent console. It is a virtually unknown curiosity, existing today as another alternative. Runs only on Unix.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related Posts:

• A Brief History of Web Browsers
• Firefox Trivia
• What Your Web-Browser Says About You - part 2
• KDE on Road Kill, Old games and Macintosh - Sad but true story.
• Browser War (Round 2)

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