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Home , Agora (web browser), Amaya (web editor), Arena (web browser), Browser engine, Browser wars, Camino (web browser)

INTERNET EXPLORER

Windows Explorer (formerly , commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for that year. Later versions were available as free downloads, or in service packs, and included in the OEM service releases of Windows 95 and later versions of Windows.

Internet Explorer has been the most widely used since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with and .[citation needed] Since its peak of popularity, its usage share has been declining in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers, and is 34.27% as of January 2012. It had been slightly higher, 43.55% as of February 2011, just prior to the release of the current version. Microsoft spent over $100 million USD per year on Internet Explorer in the late ,[1] with over 1000 working on it by 1999.

Since its first release, Microsoft has added features and technologies such as basic table display (in version 1.5); XMLHttpRequest (in version 5), which aids creation of dynamic web pages; and Internationalized Domain Names (in version 7), which allow Web sites to have native-language addresses with non-Latin characters. The browser has also received scrutiny throughout its development for use of third-party technology (such as the of Spyglass , used without royalty in early versions) and security and privacy vulnerabilities, and both the and the have alleged that integration of Internet Explorer with Windows has been to the detriment of other browsers.

The Internet Explorer project was started in the summer of 1994 by ,[7] using source code from Spyglass, Inc. Mosaic, an early commercial web browser with formal ties to the pioneering NCSA Mosaic browser.[8][9] In late 1994, Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic for a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's non-Windows revenues for the .[9] Although bearing a name similar to NCSA Mosaic, Spyglass Mosaic had used the NCSA Mosaic source code sparingly.[10] Microsoft has been sued by Synet Inc. in 1996 over the trademark infringement.

FIREFOX

Mozilla is a free and web browser descended from the Application Suite and managed by . As of December 2011, Firefox is the second most widely used browser, according to different estimates, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers. The browser has had particular success in Germany and Poland, where it is the most popular browser with 52% usage and 45% respectively.

To display web pages, Firefox uses the layout engine, which implements most current in addition to several features that are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.

Features include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a , , location-aware browsing (also known as "geolocation") based exclusively on a service and an integrated search system that uses Google by default in most localizations. Functions can be added through extensions, created by third-party developers, of which there is a wide selection, a feature that has attracted many of Firefox's users.

Firefox runs on various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, , Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and many other platforms. Its current stable release is version 10.0, released on January 31, 2012.

The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by , and . They believed the commercial requirements of 's sponsorship and developer- driven compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's , they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.

NETSCAPE

Netscape Browser is the name of a proprietary Windows web browser published by AOL, but developed by Mercurial Communications. It is the eighth major release in name of the Netscape series of browsers, originally produced by the defunct Netscape Communications Corporation.

While 's version numbers start at 8, it is based on Mozilla Firefox, whereas and 7 were based on Mozilla Application Suite, itself a complete of the codebase developed in versions 1 through 4 - and . As with other recent versions, it incorporates support for AOL Instant Messenger, and other AOL-related features.

The Netscape Browser series was succeeded by Netscape Navigator 9. However, on December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL would discontinue the web browser on February 1, 2008.

The Netscape browser was first released in October 1994. In mid-1994, Silicon founder Jim Clark had begun collaborating with to found Mosaic Communications, named after a University of Illinois software project. (The company was later renamed Netscape Communications.) Within about 6 months, many of the resources from the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Mosaic Project were working for Netscape, and a Mosaic-based browser was released to the public. Version 8.0 was made generally available on May 19, 2005. A minor update known as version 8.0.1 was released a few hours later to incorporate the key security patches added in Firefox 1.0.4.

MOSAIC

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the . It was also a for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and . Its clean, easily understood , reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate . While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by the lesser-known and ViolaWWW.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)[4] at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993,and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997. However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA.

Fifteen years after Mosaic's introduction, the most popular contemporary browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and , retain many of the characteristics of the original Mosaic (GUI) and interactive experience.

Netscape Navigator was later developed by James H. Clark and many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla.

Mosaic was the web browser which led to the Internet boom of the 1990s. Robert Reid underscores this importance stating, "while still an undergraduate, Marc wrote the Mosaic software ... that made the web popularly relevant and touched off the revolution"

OPERA

On January 28, 2003,[22] 7 was released, introducing the new "" layout engine, with improved CSS, client-side scripting, and (DOM) support. Mac OS 9 support was dropped.

Version 7.0 saw Opera undergo an extensive rewrite with the faster and more powerful Presto layout engine. The new engine brought almost full support for the HTML DOM meaning that parts of, or a whole, page can be re-rendered in response to DOM and script events.

A 2004 review in described Opera 7.5 as being excessively complex and difficult to use. The review also criticized the free edition's use of obtrusive advertisements when other browsers such as Mozilla and were offered free of charge without including advertisements.

In August 2004, Opera 7.6 began limited alpha testing. It had more advanced standards support, and introduced voice support for Opera, as well as support for Voice XML. Opera also announced a new browser for Interactive Television, which included a fit to width option Opera 8 introduced. Fit to Width is a technology that initially utilized the power of CSS, but it is now internal Opera technology. Pages are dynamically resized by making images and/or text smaller, and even removing images with specific dimensions to it fit on any screen width, improving the experience on smaller screens dramatically. Opera 7.6 was never officially released as a final version.

On January 12, 2005, Opera Software announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions,[24] a change from the previous cost of $1,000 USD for unlimited licenses. Schools that opted for the included Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, University of Oxford, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Duke University. Opera was commonly criticized for having been ad-sponsored, since this was seen as a barrier to gaining market share. In the newer versions the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners, or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. Users could pay a license fee to remove the advertisement bar.

GOOGLE CHROME

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface , or "chrome", of web browsers.[citation needed] As of January 2012, Chrome is the second most widely used browser, having overtaken Firefox in November 2011, with a 28.4% worldwide usage share of web browsers and is the most popular browser in Pakistan, Russia, India[3] and South America, according to StatCounter.

In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project called . This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help port the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Google also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt the V8 JavaScript engine to improve performance. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed source software programs. Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open source licenses. Chromium implements a similar feature set as Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates, built-in PDF reader and Google branding, and has a blue-colored logo instead of the multicolored Google logo

For six years, Google's Chief Executive was against the idea of building an independent web browser. He stated that "At the time, Google was a small company", and he did not want to go through "bruising ". However, after co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired several Mozilla Firefox developers and built a demonstration of Chrome, Schmidt admitted that "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind".

ARENA

The browser (also known as the Arena WWW Browser) was an early web browser and web authoring tool for . Originally authored by in 1993, the browser continued its development at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing. As a testbed browser, Arena was used in testing the implementation for HTML3, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and . Arena was widely used and popular at the beginning of the World Wide Web.

Arena, which predated Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, featured a number of innovations which were later used in commercial products.[16] It was the first browser to support background images, , text around images, and inline mathematical expressions.

The Arena browser served as the W3C's testbed browser from 1994 to 1996 when it was succeeded by the project. n 1993, Dave Raggett, then at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Bristol, devoted his spare time to developing Arena on which he hoped to demonstrate new and future HTML specifications. Development of the browser was slow because Raggett was the lone developer and HP, which like many other computer corporations at the time, was unconvinced that the Internet would succeed and thus did not consider investing in web browser development. Raggett demonstrated the browser at the first World Wide Web Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1994 and the 1994 ISOC conference in Prague to show text flow around images, forms, and other aspects of HTML later termed as the HTML+ specification.Raggett subsequently partnered with CERN, to develop Arena further as a proof of concept browser for this work. Using the Arena browser, Dave Raggett, , Håkon Wium Lie and others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions, resizable tables, image backgrounds, HTML math, and other features.At the Web World conference in Orlando, in early 1995, Raggett demonstrated the different new features of Arena.

Since July 1994 Lie was integrating libwww and CSS and helping Raggett. In October 1995, Yves Lafon joined the team for a year to provide support for HTML and style sheet development.

Arena was originally released for Unix, and although there was talk of a Windows and port, neither came to fruition

AGORA

Agora was a World Wide Web browser and was a proof of concept to help people to use the full internet. Agora was an email-based web browser designed for non-graphic terminals and to help people without full access to the internet such as in developing countries or without a permanent internet connection. Similar to W3Gate, Agora was a application designed to fetch HTML documents through e- rather than http.

Agora was not a client application. To access the Internet you had to install the Agora browser on a server and send Agora an email with the requested URL. The Agora application would send an email back with the requested content of the link. The email which was sent by the server, contained the HTML source code so that a normal web browser was able to display the page as it should be or in a -style. Different options made browsing easier. The servers could be configured differently so that some servers sent back containing only JavaScript, because the content was deeper on the page. Agora was praised for handling frames correctly, although other similar applications were able to handle this by serving the source code and rerequest the used frame.

SAFARI

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X , it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the native browser for iOS. A version of Safari for the Microsoft Windows operating system, first released on June 11, 2007, supports Windows XP, , and . The latest stable release of the browser is 5.1.3 for Mac OS X Lion, and 5.1.2 for both Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft Windows. According to , Safari accounted for 62.17 percent of browsing traffic and 5.43 percent of desktop traffic in October 2011, giving a combined market share of 8.72 percent.Safari is the fourth most popular web browser, behind Internet Explorer (49.59 percent), Mozilla Firefox (21.20), and Google Chrome (16.60).

Until 1997, Apple Macintosh computers were shipped with the Netscape Navigator and web browsers only. Internet Explorer for Mac was later included as the default web browser for Mac OS 8.1 and onwards, as part of a five year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. During that time, Microsoft released three major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac that were bundled with Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, though Apple continued to include Netscape Navigator as an alternative. Microsoft ultimately released a Mac OS X edition of Internet Explorer for Mac, which was included as the default browser in all Mac OS X releases from Mac OS X DP4 until Mac OS X v10.2.

CAMINO

Camino (from the Spanish word camino meaning "") is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system. In place of an XUL-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino uses Mac-native Cocoa .

As Camino's is to integrate as well as possible with the Mac OS, it uses the user interface and integrates a number of Mac OS X services and features such as the for password management and for scanning available bookmarks across the local network. Other notable features include an integrated pop-up blocker and ad blocker, and tabbed browsing that includes an overview feature allowing tabs to be viewed all at once as pages.

The browser is developed by the Camino Project, a community organization. has been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt moved to the Safari team at Apple Inc. in mid- 2002.

In late 2001, Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application. In early 2002 Dave Hyatt, one of the co-creators of Firefox (then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.

The first downloadable build of Chimera 0.1 was released on February 13, 2002. The early releases became popular due to their fast page-loading speeds (as compared with then-dominant Mac browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5).

Hyatt was hired by Apple Computer in mid-2002 to start work on what would become Safari. Meanwhile, the Chimera developers got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology for the January 2003 Macworld Conference. However, two days before the show, AOL management decided to abandon the entire project. Despite this setback, a skeleton crew of QA and developers released Camino 0.7 on March 3, 2003.

The name was changed from Chimera to Camino for legal reasons. Because of its roots in Greek mythology, Chimera has been a popular choice of name for systems. One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera,[5] and researchers at the University of , Irvine, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name.[6] Camino is Spanish for "path" or "road" (as in El Camino Real, aka the Royal Road), and the name was chosen to continue the "Navigator" .

KONQUEROR

Konqueror is a web browser and that provides functionality for file systems such as local , files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is a core part of the KDE desktop environment. Konqueror is developed by volunteers and can run on most Unix-like operating systems and on Windows systems. Konqueror, along with the rest of the components in the KDEBase package, is licensed and distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

The name "Konqueror" is a reference to the two primary competitors at the time of the browser's first release: "first comes theNavigator, then Explorer, and then the Konqueror". It also follows the KDE naming convention: the names of most KDE programs begin with the letter K.

Konqueror was released with version 2 of KDE on October 23, 2000. It replaces its predecessor, KFM (KDE file manager).With the release of KDE4, the file manager functionality of Konqueror was replaced by .

Konqueror's user interface is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (in turn designed after Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic), though it is more customizable. It works extensively with "panels", which can be rearranged or added. For example, one could have an Internet bookmarks panel on the left side of the browser window, and by clicking a , the respective would be viewed in the larger panel to the right. Alternatively, one could display a hierarchical list of folders in one panel and the content of the selected folder in another. Panels are quite flexible and can even include, among other KParts, components, a console window, a , a media player. Panel configurations can be saved, and there are some default configurations. (For example, "" displays a screen split into two panels, where each one contains a folder, Web site, or file view.)

Navigation functions (back, forward, history, etc.) are available during all operations. Most keyboard can be remapped using a graphical configuration, and navigation can be conducted through an assignment of letters to nodes on the active file by pressing the control key. The has extensive autocompletion support for local directories, past , and past search terms.

The application uses a tabbed document interface, wherein a window can contain multiple documents in tabs. Multiple document interfaces are not supported, however it is possible to recursively divide a window to view multiple documents simultaneously, or simply open another window.

NETSURF

NetSurf is an open source web browser which has its own layout engine. It is designed to be lightweight and portable, supporting both mainstream systems (e.g. Mac OS X and Unix-like) and older or uncommon platforms (e.g. AmigaOS, and RISC OS). NetSurf has many typical web browser features, including tabbed browsing, bookmarks and page thumbnailing.

The NetSurf project was started in April 2002 in response to a discussion of the deficiencies of the RISC OS platform's existing web browsers.[1] Shortly after the project's inception, development versions for RISC OS users were made available for download by the project's automated build system. NetSurf was voted "Best non-commercial software" four times in Drobe Launchpad's annual RISC OS awards between 2004 and 2008.

NetSurf's multi-platform core is written in ANSI tag">C, and implements most of the HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 specifications using its own bespoke layout engine. As of version 2.0, NetSurf uses Hubbub, an HTML parser that follows the work-in-progress HTML5 specification. As well as rendering GIF, JPEG, PNG and BMP images, the browser also supports formats native to RISC OS, including Sprite, Draw and ArtWorks files. As of 2011, NetSurf has no support for JavaScript.

NetSurf began in April 2002 as a web browser for the RISC OS platform. Work on a GTK port began in June 2004[9] to aid development and debugging. It has since gained many of the user interface features present in the RISC OS version. The browser is packaged with several distributions including and NetBSD.

A native BeOS/Haiku port has been developed. Since the GTK version was built for AmigaOS, using Cygnix which provides an X11 environment, a native AmigaOS port has also been developed. In January 2009, NetSurf was made available on MorphOS, an operating system that is API-compatible with AmigaOS. Work has started on a Windows port, but as of September 2009 no official releases have been made.

A framebuffer port was created in September 2008. Unlike the other ports, it does not use any GUI toolkit, but instead renders its own mouse pointer, and other widgets. The framebuffer front end has been used to create a web kiosk on embedded systems.

In January 2010, the NetSurf Developers announced the release of what they expected at the time to be the last release for RISC OS.[16] Lead developer John-Mark Bell said at the time "Realistically, the people qualified to maintain the RISC OS port are up to their necks in other stuff." Subsequently, Steve Fryatt volunteered himself as maintainer.

January 2011 saw the announcement of a Mac OS X port.[19] A port to Atari 16-bit and 32-bit computers was also started in January 2011

SEA MONKEY

SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform . It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code. Core Mozilla project source code is licensed under a disjunctive tri-license that gives the choice of one of the three following sets of licensing terms: , version 1.1 or later, GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later, GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later.

The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the . The new project-leading group is the SeaMonkey Council.

SeaMonkey consists of a web browser (SeaMonkey Navigator), which is a descendant of the Netscape family, an e-mail and client program (SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups, which shares code with ), an HTML editor (SeaMonkey Composer) and an IRC client (ChatZilla). The software suite supports skins. It comes with two skins in the default installation, Modern and Classic.

SeaMonkey Composer is a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Its main user interface features four tabs: Normal (WYSIWYG), HTML tags, HTML code, and browser preview. The generated code is HTML 4.01 Transitional. As of version 1.1.13, SeaMonkey Composer supports basic text formatting and styling, insertion of and images, and the creation of tables. It does not support the addition of form elements (text fields, check boxes, and buttons). SeaMonkey Composer is scheduled to be updated with the release of KompoZer 0.8 which is currently under development.

K-MELEON

K-Meleon is a web browser for the Microsoft Windows platform. Based on the same Gecko layout engine as Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon uses native Windows application programming interface (API) to create the user interface, instead of using Mozilla's cross-platform XML User Interface Language (XUL) layer, and as a result, is tightly integrated into the look and feel of the Windows desktop; this approach is similar to that of and Epiphany (for the GNOME desktop), and Camino (for Mac OS X). This also makes K-Meleon less resource-intensive.

K-Meleon is released under the GNU General Public License and runs on the Win32 platform. The current release version of K-Meleon is 1.5.4, which was released on March 5, 2010. This release is based on the Gecko 1.8.1.24pre rendering engine.

K-Meleon's very first version was originally written by Christophe Thibault and released to the public on August 21, 2000.[2]

The change from the K-Meleon 0.9.x series to 1.0.x was a major modification. The most notable change was the main K-Meleon code being updated to accommodate the Gecko 1.8.0.x rendering engine, as used in the latest releases of SeaMonkey and Mozilla Firefox. The change of layout not only brought the browser up-to-date on the level of security, but on web as well. Several other major improvements included support for and multi-user environments. Some themes and macros from version 0.9 are still compatible with 1.0, although the macro system has been updated. An even more fundamental update of the macro system was made concurrent with the development of K- Meleon 1.1,[3] which is based on the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine that is used in Mozilla .0 and SeaMonkey 1.1. The last release of the earlier K-Meleon 0.9 series (which was based on the earlier Mozilla 1.7.x rendering engine used in the former Mozilla Application Suite) was K-Meleon 0.9.13 (released April 24, 2006).[4] That release was based on the Mozilla 1.7.13 build (the final Mozilla Suite release). Although K-Meleon 0.9.13 is based on Gecko 1.7.13, which is now obsolete, a simulation of it (called "K-Meleon0.9.13-ud3-1.8.0.7")[5] has been made that is based on a current "k-meleon.exe" and a recent 1.8.0.x Gecko rendering engine to allow people who prefer the older K-Meleon 0.9 interface to update their browsing to current security standards.

K-Meleon saw another big development with the release of 1.5.x. With this version, the layers plug- in became obsolete and was replaced with built-in tabs. This was the first time real tabs were implemented in an official build. Various other features and improvements were added along the line of the 1.5.x. series.

K-Meleon was one of the twelve browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows in 2010.

GNOME EPIPHANY

Epiphany is an open source web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. The browser is a descendant of Galeon and was created after developer disagreements about Galeon's growing complexity. Since then Epiphany has been developed as part of the GNOME project and uses most of GNOME's technology and when applicable. As required by the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), Epiphany maintains the clean and simple graphical user interface with only a required minimum number of features exposed to users by default; however, the browser's functionality and configurability can be extended with official and third-party extensions.

Instead of developing a custom web Epiphany originally used the Gecko layout engine until version 2.28 and WebKit starting with version 2.20. This approach allows the relatively small developer community to maintain a sufficient level of modern web standards support. The features of Epiphany include reuse of GNOME configuration settings, smart bookmarks and web application integration into user desktop. Epiphany extensions add support for ad filtering, user scripts support and other smaller, yet useful, options.

Epiphany's source code is available under the GNU General Public License from the GNOME project. The binary builds of the browser are available in the package repositories of most Linux distributions and BSD releases.

Epiphany was originally developed as a of Galeon by Marco Pesenti Gritti, who was also the initiator of Galeon. The fork occurred because of the divergent aims of Gritti and the rest of Galeon development team about new features. While Gritti regarded Galeon's monolithic design and the number of user- configurable features as factors limiting Galeon's maintainability and user base expansion, the rest of the Galeon developers believed that more features should be added. At the same time the GNOME project created the GNOME human interface guidelines, which promoted simplification of user interfaces. As Galeon was considered a power user-oriented browser, the implementation of those guidelines was believed to be unacceptable by most developers. As a result, Gritti created a new browser based on Galeon's codebase, with most of the non-mission-critical features removed. Epiphany was intended to be fully compliant with the GNOME human interface guidelines, with a very simple user interface. As such Epiphany does not have its own settings and uses GNOME’s settings, which are specified in the GNOME Control Center

MAXTHON

Maxthon, originally known as MyIE2, is a free web browser for Microsoft Windows. The latest release, Maxthon 3, supports both the and the WebKit rendering engines.

Maxthon won CNET WebWare 100 Awards in 2008. and 2009, and was #97 in PCWorld’s list of the 100 Best Products of 2011.

According to Maxthon International CEO Ming Jie "Jeff" Chen, Maxthon was based on MyIE, which was originally created by Changyou, a Chinese who wanted to customize the Internet Explorer web browser. Changyou posted most of the source code[8] for MyIE on his before leaving the project in 2000. Chen continued developing MyIE and in 2002 released a new version, MyIE2 MyIE2 grew quickly, with users around the world contributing plugins and skins and assisting with debugging. It was renamed Maxthon in 2003.

In 1999, Chen founded Hong Kong-based Mysoft International Limited to distribute the MyIE browser.[11] In 2005 the company received funding from firm WI Harper Group and Morten Lund, the first investor, and Chen moved the company to Beijing. In 2006 Maxthon received further investment from the US-based venture capital firm Charles River Ventures.[10]

On April 10, 2007, TechCrunch reported that Google had invested at least US$1 million in Maxthon;this was denied the following day by Chen.[15] However, in an interview with the Chinese portal Sina.com, Chen did not rule out future "co-operation" between the two .

Maxthon was one of the twelve browsers Microsoft presented in 2010 at BrowserChoice.eu, a that allows users of Microsoft Windows residing in the European Economic Area to choose which default web browser they would like to use on their computer.

LUNASCAPE

Lunascape is a web browser developed by Lunascape Corporation in Tokyo, Japan. It is unique in that it contains three rendering engines: Gecko (used in Mozilla Firefox), WebKit (used in Apple Safari and Google Chrome), and Trident (used in Microsoft Internet Explorer). The user can switch between layout engines seamlessly.

Lunascape browser was originally published in October 2001 while the founders were still in college. As the browser became popular, Hidekazu Kondo established Lunascape Corporation in August 2004 while pursuing a PhD and became the CEO. Lunascape was selected as "Exploratory Software Project" commissioned by Japanese government.

It branched out to the United States in June 2008 and is currently based in Sunnyvale, California.

Lunascape internationally introduced its browser in December 2008.