What is Web Browser - MasterVPN

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information
resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources.
The major web browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Contents 1 List of web-browsers 2 Comparison of web-browsers 3 Pro / Contra 4 Recommendation

List of web-browsers

The mainly known web-browsers are:
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey, Google Chrome, Safari, Netscape Navigator, Konqueror, Opera, AOL Explorer
But there are numerous others:
Maxthon, Amaya, Epiphany, Camino, Arachne, K-Meleon, Shiira, Sputnik, iCab, Galeon, Links, Phoenix, OmniWeb, Avant, and many many more;
For iOS (iPhone, iPad, etc.) see a list of available browsers here: http://ipod.about.com/od/bestiphoneapps/tp/Top-Iphone-Web-Browser-Apps.htm

Comparison of web-browsers

The mostly-recommended browser is certainly Mozilla Firefox. It's open source and free, platform-independent and easy to extend.

• having the latest version? -> http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
• get security and privacy related addons for mozilla -> https://addons.mozilla.org/
• Use our HMA! Webproxy browser extension for Firefox and Chrome -> http://wiki.hidemyass.com/Extension

For a more detailed comparison of web-browsers see the Wikipedia article: Comparison of web-browsers -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

Pro / Contra

Privacy:
Google Chrome logs your online activity and send's it to Google. Big minus!
Internet Explorer is from Microsoft, no trust there, but it seems to not spy as Chrome does.
Firefox is open-source, spyware-free and trusted.
Speed:
Google Chrome and Internet Explorer are faster than Firefox
Firefox needs the most system resources
Extensions:
Firefox is very easy to extend and has thousands of extensions.
Google Chrome tries too, but will probably never do as well as Firefox does, regarding add-ons and extensions.
Internet Explorer offers no extensions, only useless spyware toolbars

Recommendation

At the end, we'll certainly recommend Mozilla Firefox because of the following reasons:

• free
• open source
• easy to extend
• not from Microsoft (that's a plus!)
• not from Google (that's also a plus!)

When coming to points of speed and system performance, Mozilla Firefox could be better. It's not as fast as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. But it's free, open-source, and easy to extend.
It's regularly updated and has a big community which helps developing further versions of Firefox. There are countless add-ons.