Rendering Engines

Rendering engines are the programme parts in a browser responsible for displaying the content.

While it should be best practice to associate different browser rendering behaviour to their rendering engines, the user agent actually does not give the proper information for this.

E.g.IE9’s Compatibility View will map to IE7 Standards Mode, and IE9’s UA string when in Compatibility View will be:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)

For style sheet programmers it means that the expected rendering behaviour must be anticipated from the browser's version, not from the rendering engine's version.

ID	Name	Comment
4	AppleWebKit	Rendering Engine for MacOS based browsers like Safari iCab 4 and later Epiphany 2.26 and later OmniWeb Shiira Midori (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
3	Gecko	Rendering Enging for Mozilla based browsers like: Firefox Netscape 6 and later Mozilla Camino K-Meleon SeaMonkey Epiphany 2.20 and before Galeon (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
7	iCab	Rendering Engine for iCab 3 and before (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
5	KHTML	Rendering Engine for Konqueror (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
6	Presto	Rendering Engine for Opera (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
2	Tasman	Actual (2008) Microsoft rendering engine for MacOS (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
8	Tkhtml	Rendering Engine for HtmlViewer (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)
1	Trident	Actual (2008) Microsoft rendering engine for Windows (source: Jan Wolter, http://unixpapa.com/)