In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7.4% of browser use. The Firefox usage share has slowly declined in 2010, from 24.4% in January to 22.8% in December.
Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; it has a dominant share of Apple-based Web browsing, having risen from 4.5% usage share in January 2010 to 5.9% in December 2010. Its rendering engine, called WebKit, is also running in the standard browsers of several mobile phone platforms, including Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia S60 and Palm webOS.
The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's WebKit-based Chrome, first released in September 2008. Its market share has quickly risen; its usage share has nearly doubled from 5.2% in January 2010 to 10.0% in December 2010, and appears to be gaining further in the coming months.
In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.
Interactivity in a web page can also be supplied by JavaScript, which usually does not require a plugin. JavaScript can be used along with other technologies to allow "live" interaction with the web page's server via Ajax.
Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.
Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".
All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.
Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Mozilla Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed. In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.
Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.
Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.
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