It isn’t always easy to find reliable information about those things, so if you spot any errors, please do correct me. It’s hard to remember the details of when a particular version of a particular browser was released, and even harder for an outsider to know the intimate details of which technology it uses and stuff like that. I have settled for making a few general remarks such as which rendering engine each browser uses, how long it has been available, and if there is anything in particular I know about its history that could be of interest. This is not intended to be an extensive review of each browser. Knutson’s massive compilation of Macintosh Web Browsers. If you’re looking for a complete list of all web browsers ever made for a Mac, take a look at Darrel E. I have also chosen not to list any applications that are primarily something else and happen to be capable of rendering Web pages (RSS readers like NetNewsWire, e-mail applications like Apple Mail, and text editors like TextMate and BBEdit for instance). I have picked the ones I happen to keep on my hard drive and that I think are relevant to some extent for Web professionals. I am not attempting to list every single browser. Listed in this article are some of the Mac OS X browsers that are currently available and “alive”, meaning that they are actively developed. I don’t think there are many who miss it.

Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was once a great browser, but the rest have caught up and surpassed it years ago. And Internet Explorer is no longer an option, since it has been discontinued and is no longer available for download from Microsoft. Mac OS X users have a large number of excellent, standards compliant browsers to choose from. Today, in late 2007, things are different.

And IE and Mozilla were the only real options you had back then, unless you wanted to run a web browser in Classic mode (Mac OS 9 emulation).

It was a bit shaky, but it was still better and faster than IE. I don’t remember exactly when and which version of Mozilla I used, but I think it was before Mozilla 1.0 was released, so in late 2001 or early 2002. I wanted something better than IE, so as soon as it would run natively on Mac OS X I switched to Mozilla. Pretty much the only viable option for the first release of Mac OS X in 2001 was Internet Explorer 5. Several years ago, when Mac OS X was still a very young operating system, it was hard to find a really good and stable web browser for the Mac.

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