The sunbirds and spiderhunters are very small which feed largely on nectar, although they will also take insects, especially when feeding young. Flight is fast and direct on their short wings. Most species can take nectar by hovering like a hummingbird, but usually perch to feed most of the time.
Although they are completely unrelated, the sunbirds find counterparts in the of the Americas and the of Australia. The resemblances are due to due to the similar nectar-feeding lifestyle. The sunbirds are tropical species, with representatives from; however, the greatest variety of species is in Africa where the group probably arose. Most species are sedentary or short-distance. Because the Netscape browser initially implemented many features not available in other browsers and quickly came to dominate the market, a number of web sites were designed to only work, or work fully, when they detected an appropriate version of Mozilla in the user agent string. Thus, competing browsers began to emulate in order to receive content intended for Netscape, its main rival at the time of its development. This format of user agent string has since been copied by other user agents, and persists today even though Explorer has come to dominate the browser market.