The browser is playing an increasingly important role. In addition to its original purpose, the presentation of static content, multimedia content or applications can now be consumed via the browser.

Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Firefox

Chrome's speed has certainly contributed to its rapid success. Firefox has only been able to keep up in terms of speed since the switch from Gecko to the Quantum browser engine, but Chrome still has a very slight lead here.

Chrome has also set new standards in security: By introducing "sandboxing", i.e. isolating the processes from the operating system, Chrome provides more security and a higher stability. Individual tabs are started in isolation and thus cannot influence each other. In addition, a dangerous website from the isolated process theoretically cannot cause any damage to the operating system. Meanwhile, Firefox also uses a sandbox, which means that Firefox is also considered a secure browser.

A significant advantage of Firefox is its handling of private data: Firefox is, in contrast to Chrome, open source and offers better control over one's own data.

Compatibility on the Web - HTML Renderer

At the time of Internet Explorer, a website had to be tested and optimized for different browsers, otherwise it might be displayed differently or sometimes incorrectly in different browsers. One of the reasons for this was that Microsoft didn't always follow the web standards, or even wanted to set them themselves. Especially in companies, pages that were optimized for Internet Explorer were very stubborn.

Google Chrome consists largely of the open source browser Chromium. Due to the high market share of Google Chrome, the issue of compatibility has eased somewhat today and at the latest since the new Microsoft Edge browser, in addition to the lesser-known browsers such as Opera, also uses the Chrome HTML renderer engine Blink and the JavaScript interpreter V8 from Chromium, the direction is clearly set ...

As relevant browser engines remain:

• Chromium (Blink and V8) used by Google Chrome (for all operating systems except macOS and iOS), Microsoft Edge, Samsung Internet, Opera, ...
• in Firefox, the engine: Quantum and
• the Apple operating systems macOS and iOS uses WebKit for all browsers: for their browser Safari and also for Google Chrome.

Besides the fact that most web browsers use Chromium, today all engines largely adhere to web standards. Another reason for the high compatibility between Chromium and the WebKit used by Apple may be the fact that Blink originally evolved from WebKit and WebKit from KHTML. So, apart from Firefox, all relevant browsers have the same roots.

The browser market share

• Chrome 65%
• Safari 18.55%
• Edge 5.03%
• Firefox 2.8%
• Samsung Internet 2.64%
• Opera 2.53%

The importance of the browser: trend towards web applications

Applications that used to be made available for a specific system are now often operated as web applications over the intranet or Internet. All that is required is a browser, regardless of the operating system or end device.

From the developer's point of view, a single web application can be developed for different device types and operating systems.

From an operational point of view, the application does not need to be installed and operated on the end devices. The cost is the operation of a web server. If a server is needed to run the application anyway, a web server usually delivers the advantage that the server does not need to be near the clients and one server can serve multiple sites.

Default browser: Reset setting

The following commands in the command prompt will invalidate the default browser setting for http and https links, which will cause the default browser to be asked again the next time a link is called.

reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations\https\UserChoice /v Hash /f
reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations\http\UserChoice /v Hash /f