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browser_engines.htm
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today</title>
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<h1>History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today</h1>
<h2>Many tried, few remain...</h2>
<p style="color: red; font-size: small;">Last updated: March 2025</p>
<p>The loss of browser diversity since the rise of Chromium has been greatly lamented. Below you can find a graph that shows the historical and present browser engines (not browsers, but the HTML rendering engines), as well as from when to when they were developed. For the bigger engines, the market share is indicated by a coloured shape (see legend). <br /><br />
We're now well into the "fourth era of dominance". NCSA Mosaic dominated at the beginning (first dominance), but it was dethroned by Netscape which briefly held the majority of the market share (second dominance), both of which then were overtaken by Internet Explorer (originally using the engine from Spyglass Mosaic, and later Trident) (third dominance), which then was weakened first by Firefox (Gecko engine) but finally dethroned by Chromium (Blink engine) (fourth dominance). In terms of active and relevant engines there's now only Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Samsung Internet, UC Browser and many more), WebKit (Safari and all iOS browsers), and Gecko (Firefox and its forks).<br /><br />But see for yourself:</p>
<a href="pics/Browser Engine List.png" target="_blank"><img src="pics/Browser Engine List.png" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="List of Browser Engines and their historical market shares" />
<p>Click here to open the picture in a new tab</p></a>
<hr>
<p>Today's surviving engines can be divided into multiple groups:</p>
<p><strong>1. Active and fully-featured engines</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Gecko</strong> (Firefox). Down to 3% market share, and in my opinion mismanaged by Mozilla which prioritizes "activism" over improving the browser. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Goanna</strong> (Pale Moon), a fork of an old version of Gecko. At 0% market share and always at risk of not catching up with the newest web standards that Google invents. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>WebKit</strong> (Safari), a fork of KHTML. Around 15-20% market share thanks to Apple's policy of only allowing WebKit-based browsers on iOS. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Blink</strong>, a fork of WebKit. It's the dominant engine nowadays, and it underpins Chromium, which is the basis for Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet and most other browsers; QtWebengine, which is the basis for Falkon and Otter Browser; Android WebView; Windows WebView 2; and Electron, where Blink is used to render the UI of apps. Close to 80% market share. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>2. Experimental but ambitious new engines, which have the potential to compete with the "big" ones</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Servo</strong>. This promising engine was developed by Mozilla, and parts of the Servo engine have been incorporated into Gecko. In 2020, Mozilla fired a quarter of their developers, which apparently included the whole Servo team. Since then, Servo is hosted by the Linux Foundation and again in active development. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://www.ekioh.com/blog" target="_blank">Flow</a></strong>, which focuses on TVs, but seems to be a promising newcomer. Unfortunately it's not open source so it's likely that the company will concentrate on their TV niche and that Flow won't ever become a real competitor to Blink. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong>LibWeb</strong> and <strong>Ladybird engine</strong>, the engine powering Ladybird and the SerenityOS Browser. They have received some major donations want to publish an alpha version in 2026. Great to see another contender. Note that since 2024, Ladybird is an independent browser project that doesn't target SerenityOS anymore. Therefore, the two browsers now have slightly different engines and the gap will only get bigger over time.<span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>3. Basic browser engines, not suitable for the "modern" web</strong></p>
<p> With (basic or experimental) JavaScript support:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Hubbub</strong>, used only in NetSurf, a rather basic browser with no support for advanced web standards such as HTML 5. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li>The engine of <strong>iBrowse</strong>, which is available for Amiga OS and seems to be a basic browser too without full web standards supports.<span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong>Cobra</strong> and its fork <strong>CobraEvolution</strong>. These engines are used in the Lobo and LoboEvolution browsers, written in Java. It is unclear to me what's the state of this Lobo browser and engine and whether it's alive or dead, but LoboEvolution/CobraEvolution seems to be still in development. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Gosub</strong>, a new basic web engine in development since late 2023. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Ferus</strong>, a "toy web engine" based on Chawan (a TUI web browser), in development since early 2023. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Mycel</strong>, formerly Opposum, a very basic web browser for Plan 9, in development since 2020. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
</ul>
<p> Without JavaScript support:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Dillo</strong>. Basic browser for simple websites only. While the last stable release was in 2015, there have been more commits since and the project was officially revived in 2024. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Vaev</strong>. A browser engine built for SkiftOS since November 2023.<span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>HighWire</strong>. This basic browser for Atari and FreeMint had its last release in 2010 but is still being maintained with commit activity in the repo. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>KolibriOS WebView</strong>, which started as a text browser but has over time added some basic formatting and image support.<span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Arachne</strong>. This basic browser supports only the most basic of HTML and CSS. It's not really in active development but happens to get a minor update every couple of years. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>4. Zombie engines, development has officially ended but they're still not completely dead</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Trident</strong> (Internet Explorer), while technically Trident will still get security updates until the end of Windows 10 (in 2031), there haven't been any new features or development of standards support since Edge came out in 2015. Microsoft announced that they will stop supporting Internet Explorer on most versions of Windows in 2022, but engine itself will remain accessible in Edge's "IE Mode" and hence will still receive security updates if necessary. <a href="https://endoflife.date/internet-explorer" target="_blank">For the end of life, see here.</a> <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong>EdgeHTML</strong>, mostly known from its use in Legacy Edge, which was replaced by a newer Chromium-based Edge in 2020. Legacy Edge was forcefully removed via Windows Update in April 2021, but Microsoft confirmed that the EdgeHTML engine will still be supported with security updates, as it also been used for the built-in WebView in Windows UWP apps (superseded but not automatically replaced by Blink-based WebView 2). <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong>TDEHTML</strong>. KHTML, the grandfather of Webkit and Blink, was developed for KDE's Konqueror browser. After the release of KDE 4 in 2008, Konqueror got the ability to render websites with Webkit and later Blink (which were available as Qt's webview component). KHTML got less attention and slowly became less compatible with the so-called modern web. In 2023, KHTML's development finally ended. Konqueror is still being maintained (as of 2025) but uses the Blink engine now. However, back in 2010, the Trinity Desktop Environment was created as a fork of KDE 3.5, including the whole range of KDE applications. This also means that Trinity still has their own <a href="https://www.trinitydesktop.org/faq/webbrowser.php" target="_blank">fork of Konqueror</a> (<a href="https://scm.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tdebase/src/branch/master/konqueror" target="_blank">repo</a>) from the KDE 3 days, and alongside it a still-maintained fork of KHTML, renamed to <a href="https://www.trinitydesktop.org/docs/trinity/tdelibs/tdehtml/html/index.html" target="_blank">TDEHTML</a> (<a href="https://scm.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tdelibs/src/branch/master/tdehtml" target="_blank">repo</a>). It is also used in other parts of the Trinity Desktop, such as rendering emails in their fork (from KDE 3.5) of KMail. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Presto</strong> (Opera Mini). This engine was used in Opera until version 12 (2013). The company gave up developing their own engine and created a new browser based on Blink, which Google and Opera forked from WebKit in the same year. Opera Mini, one of the mobile browsers, still uses server-side Presto rendering on basic phones (e.g. Java-based phones), however the app hasn't been updated since 2014 but it still available for download. Even today (2025) I am seeing new "dumbphones" by Nokia being sold in the shops with Presto-based Opera Mini preinstalled! On Android, Opera Mini uses server-side Presto rendering when the "Extreme" data savings mode is chosen. The last known update to the Presto engine was in 2015 according to a blog post, but given that it's still used in Opera Mini to some degree it is likely that the code is still somewhat maintained. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span> (but source code has leaked)</li>
<li><strong>U2</strong> (UC Browser). This engine was used in older versions of UC Browser. It is not quite clear to which extent it is used today; it appears to still be used in the app for basic phones, which like Opera Mini hasn't been updated since 2014 but is still available to download. Furthermore, past version of Android seemed to have included an optional "Speed Mode" that would revert to U2 rendering instead of Blink rendering, however this feature seems to be absent from Android nowadays. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>5. Text browsers</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Lynx</strong> <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>Links</strong> <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>w3m</strong> <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>chawan</strong> <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>6. Embedded rendering</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong><a href="https://www.sciter.com" target="_blank">Sciter</a></strong>. Used for rendering the UI of apps. There's no browser using Sciter to display websites, and the engine is <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span>.</li>
<li><strong><a href="https://ultralig.ht/" target="_blank">Ultralight</a></strong>. Soft fork of WebKit that aims to be a light-weight alternative to Electron (Chromium) for apps. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong>MS Word</strong>. This is the engine used in Microsoft Office, including Outlook which uses it render HTML emails. There's no browser using the Word engine to display websites. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://www.princexml.com/" target="_blank">Prince</a></strong>. This is a HTML/CSS engine used in a commercial product that converts HTML into PDFs. There's no browser using this engine to display websites. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://github.com/vercel/satori/" target="_blank">Satori</a></strong>. This is a HTML/CSS engine used used to converts HTML into SVGs. There's no browser using this engine to display websites. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://lexbor.com/" target="_blank">Lexbor</a></strong>. Meant for HTML/CSS based apps or displaying internal HTML documents. <span style="background-color: lightgreen;">Open source</span></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://vox.sx/" target="_blank">Vox</a></strong>, a new engine built from scratch since 2024 that aims to be an alternative to Electron. <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span></li>
<li>Chinese Blink variants. There is little information out there. There seems to be <strong>X5</strong> by Tencent, used in WeChat and some versions of QQ Browser, as well as <strong>T7</strong> used by Baidu's "baiduboxapp" (a search app for phones?), both <span style="background-color: tomato;">Closed source</span>. Other Chinese engines include UC's U3 and Baidu's T5, both of which seem to be dead now. <strong>ArkWeb</strong> first surfaced in 2024, originally announced as an "in-house" engine from Huawei for its upcoming HarmonyOS Next mobile operating system, to be used for web development and rendering within their proprietary framework. However, it seems that ArkWeb is just a fork of Blink. So in conclusion, all these Chinese "engines" are based on Blink and it is unclear how much they actually differ or if they are just little more than a rebranding so they can claim they made their own browser engine; perhaps they're some kind of CCP-approved Blink bastardization or a real fork with useful features added - it's hard to tell.</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h2>Historical Market Share by Engine</h2>
<a href="pics/Browser Engine Market Share.png" target="_blank"><img src="pics/Browser Engine Market Share.png" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Hhistorical market shares of browser engines" /></a>
<p>
Sources:<br />
1993-1994: Georgia Institute of Technology GVU WWW User Survey<br />
1995-1999: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign WWW server access statistics<br />
2000-2007: TheCounter.com<br />
since 2008: StatCounter
</p>
<hr>
<h3>Question Marks</h3>
<p>Some questions remain and if anyone can help with information this will be greatly appreciated.</p>
<ul>
<li>Is Huawei's Arkweb engine independent or a fork of Blink?</li>
<li>Was Netscape based on NCSA Mosaic's engine? </li>
<ul><li>No, according to: Clark, Jim; Owen Edwards (1999). Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0312199340. <em>"The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code"</em>, quoted via Wikipedia. <a href="https://archive.org/details/netscapetimemaki00clar" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/netscapetimemaki00clar</a></li></ul>
<li>Was Spyglass Mosaic's engine (used also in IE 1-3) based on NCSA Mosaic's engine?</li>
<ul><li>No, according to: <a href="https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.htm" target="_blank">https://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html</a>. "Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but <em>we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch</em>, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix."</li></ul>
<li>Was Trident (IE 4-11) based on Spyglass Mosaic's engine (IE 1-3)?</li>
<ul><li>I have never found any information, so I will assume that IE 4's Trident engine was completely developed from scratch.</li></ul>
<li>Was Presto (Opera 7-12) based on Elektra (Opera 3.5-6), and was Elektra based on the original Opera's engine?</li>
<ul><li>I have assumed yes, but evidence is spurious: in <a href="http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/opera.htm" target="_blank">http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/opera.htm</a> it uses the wording "rendering engine <em>re-write (now referred to as "Presto")</em>" for Opera 7. This makes it seems like Presto was just a re-write, not a new engine written completely from scratch. The same might be true for Elektra years before.</li></ul>
<li>Was iBrowse's engine based on Mosaic?</li>
<ul><li>Wikipedia says iBrowse was a "<em>rewritten follow-on</em>" to the Amiga version of NCSA Mosaic, via Bettinson, Mat (November 1996). "Battle of the Browsers, IBrowse 1.0". CU Amiga. No. 81. EMAP. pp. 54-56. Like with Presto above, I assume that "rewritten" means "not started from scratch", but it is not very clear.</li></ul>
<li>Are the Zombie engines (see above) still maintained?</li>
<ul><li>For EdgeHTML there is the issue of Windows WebView, for which (unlike Legacy Edge) no end of life has been announced.
For Presto it is unclear because it's still kind of available in Opera Mini but only through server-side rendering so the code might be untouched for years now.</li>
<li>For U2, it's the same, just for UC Browser instead of Opera</li>
<li>Line Mode Browser (last update in 2006, but used in libwww)</li></ul>
<li>What are those obscure Chinese engines? There's <a href="https://user-agents.net/rendering-engines" target="_blank">U2, U3, X5, T5, and T7</a> at least, but besides U2, which seems to be its own thing, the rest all appear to be soft forks or mere rebrandings of WebKit/Blink. Are they really their own engines?</li>
<li>The starting and end dates of obscure and historic browsers are often speculative</li>
<li>Market shares are obviously hard to be determined, especially because there's not one single website which has kept track since the beginning of the web. The newest numbers I have used are from StatCounter, by the way.</li>
</ul>
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