Evolution Of Latest Web Browsers
Firefox – Released first in 2004
Firefox, the second position browser in terms of number of people using in this World has its root with Mozilla Application Suite. The creators of Firefox, Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt thought of browser carried around by multi-purpose suite and hence Phoenix previous name of Firefox was born. The name was changed to Firefox to avoid trademark infringement since Phoenix was the mane of BIOS manufacturer.
Firefox had a fine beginning, its feature set was highlighted in the media. Firefox released in 2004, Firefox came with a search bar built into menu bar. It also had pop-up blocker, built-in RSS reader, tabbed browsing, central download manager and was believed to be more secured than internet explorer as it did not supported ActiveX or VBScript. Firefox had a continue success as it supported extensions.
In 2005, Firefox 1.5 was released but by that time this open source browser of Mozilla ha been able to snatch 10 per cent market share of Windows-based browser. This version of Firefox was faster and it commenced automated updating in addition to security and bug fixes.
Many changes in Firefox 2.0 were slight but overall impact of those changes was notable as compared tto previous versions. The features added were inline checking of spelling, improvement in search in the course of search term suggestions, in-built phishing protection, client side session and persistent storage.
Firefox 3 was released in June 2008 with biggest change moving to Gecko 1.9 layout engine. The new layout engine bought about 15000 changes as per Mozilla to bring improvement in performance, simplified code, stability and webpage rendering.
The new features added were users simply had to click start button in the URL bar to add bookmarks. Other changes were better memory management, a ew download manager, Smart Location Bar and more. A Guinness World Record was set for most downloads in 24-hour period on release of Firefox 3. The next browser version was to be labeled as Firefox 3.1 but the changes brought in the browser were so many that it had to label the next version as Firefox 3.5.
Firefox 3.5 brought Gecko engine up-gradation form 1.9.0 to 1.9.1 that led to better compliance with web standards, a private browsing mode and border images support. The latest version had taken care of JavaScript performance in better way.
Chrome – Released first in 2008
On release of Google’s Chrome browser in 2008, lots of people were surprised. This time the browser would not remain in beta for long period. The WebKit platform used is same as used in Safari of Apple. Chrome provides much improved security and reliability as compared to any other browser available in market as it treats each browser tab a separate process. Another special feature of this browser is – a private browsing mode can run along with the regular Chrome window.
There was very little visual change in Chrome 2 but performance wise the speed was increased about 30 percent over the previous speed. Users could remove the sites from the most visited section very easily. It also offered full-screen mode and an autofill function that didn’t required users to remember what was filled in the web form.
Chrome 3, the latest version was similar in appearance to the previous ones and was without extensions but brought basic theming capabilities, advanced HTML5 capabilities support, New Tab page and tweaks with more performanace.