Web Browsers

Introduction

Modern web browsers – Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge – are considered evergreen browsers. This means that these browsers automatically update so users are always running the latest version.

This data is the worldwide usage of browsers by version number for the last year and shows how each new version of Chrome overtakes the last, in part because there’s no effort on the part of users to switch to the latest version:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

If you use your cursor to explore the dots along the lines, you can see each version by number.

Users can opt out of these auto-updates, but since they’re enabled by default, most do not.

Getting started

Most of the demos in this course will be using Mozilla Firefox, but you can work in Safari, Firefox, or Google Chrome. It’s important for you to use one of these browsers because they are evergreen and because they both have powerful built-in web developer tools that will help you examine, edit and debug the code you create.

Download at least one of these browsers:

You don’t have to understand how to use dev tools at this point; we’ll discuss that in depth later when talking about how to debug your code.👍🏻