But note that there is no stable release for this browser, and it is known to be quite buggy. If you want a simple and lightweight browser, Midori might be an interesting one to look at. But the Midori browser is an open source, lightweight browser. If you hear "Midori," you might think of a green-hued cocktail.
Lynx's source code is available under the GNU Public License (GPL) and maintained on GitHub. You might think, "who would use a text-based browser?" But it works, and there is a big community supporting this special open source browser.
It is also the oldest web browser still in use and still under development. Lynx is a unique browser as it is entirely text-based. You can find its detailed documentation and source code on the KDE website. Konqueror's source code is available under the GNU Public License (GPL).
Konqueror is maintained by the international KDE free software community, and it's easy to find on most Linux desktops. Today, Konqueror can use either its native KHTML engine or the Chromium fork. Konqueror may not be the most well-known internet browser, and that is okay because it is responsible for KHTML, the browser engine forked by Apple and then Google for the Safari and Chrome browsers (and subsequently used by Brave, Vivaldi, and several other browsers).
One interesting bit of trivia is that its co-founder Blake Ross was only 19 years old when Firefox was released. But the birth of Firefox shook that belief. Before Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer seemed to be undefeatable. FirefoxĪlthough Chrome is now the most popular browser, Mozilla Firefox is the one that started the whole open source web browser sensation. To contribute, visit the Contributing to Chromium page. Note that the Chrome browser also has some closed source code.
Google Chrome is still known as a "memory hog" due to its heavy random access memory (RAM) utilization. Chrome got better and better, and the browser eventually surpassed Firefox's browser market share. The first version of Chrome was so slow, buggy, and disappointing, which led me to think it wouldn't be successful. Mozilla Firefox, which came out much earlier, was riding a wave of popularity. I remember when Google introduced the first version of Chrome. Google Chrome, inarguably, is the most widely used internet browser-open source or otherwise.
You can find Brave's source code (available under the Mozilla Public License) in its extensive GitHub repositories (there are 140 repos as of this writing).
For many years, IE was the standard browser for Microsoft's Windows operating system, while Safari (also closed source) was the default browser for MacOS. Open source web browsers have come a long way since Microsoft dominated the web browser market with its closed source Internet Explorer (IE).