When Apple migrated the Mac operating system platform to Mac OS X, one of the key components was an underpinning based on the FreeBSD operating system. The use of an open source operating system as the core has in turn led to an increase in the use and availability of free and open source software.

Web browsing in the free software space is now based around two main camps, those based on the Mozilla codebase (Camino, Firefox, Mozilla) and those based on the KDE sourced KHTML rendering engine (Safari and OmniWeb).