Most people are only familiar with the “big five” web browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. But there are hundreds of other browsers out there. Most alternative browsers are remade versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Chrome itself is built on Chromium, an open-source browser project; Firefox is also open-source. That means that any developer can take the code, add or remove some parts of it and release a completely new browser. Why do that, though? The “big five” browsers are already highly customizable. Chrome and Firefox have particularly large libraries of extensions, but generally, you can tailor most browsers to your particular needs. Nevertheless, a large percentage of users may never have visited the Chrome Web Store or gone into Firefox’s Add-ons section. Some alternative browsers can provide additional functionality for people who don’t want to bother with installing add-ons or don’t know how to do it.
