There are more than 70 browsers for personal computers. The choice is not quite as extensive for smartphones, but it makes sense to keep an eye out for alternatives.
The mobile platform Android is especially open but there are programs for other systems specially designed for mobile internet usage. Included in that is also an economical handling of information, automatically filling out of forms, and syncing browser favourites with other devices.
The biggest selection is for the Google system Android. Its standard browser is not identical with Google Chrome but syncs the favourites with its PC version and can automatically fill out forms with repeated input. The “Google Chrome to Phone” app allows links on a computer with a Chrome browser to be marked and sent to the telephone.
“Even though Chrome and the browser in Android are not identical, both share a lot of the same code,” said Google spokesman Stefan Keuchel. Android users also enjoy very much the Dolphin browser. “You can surf very comfortably with tabs with it,” said Fabien Roehlinger from the internet portal AndroidPit.
Among the pioneers of the mobile browsers is the Norwegian company Opera, which has developed two different programs for smart phones.
Opera Mini compresses the web contents on an Opera server before sending it to the browser. This is especially useful if you have a tariff which limits the amount of data transferred and exceeding that limit is very expensive.
“Opera Mini is very beloved because it is economical, fast and intuitively operable,” said Roehlinger. Firefox for Android meanwhile is considered much slower by its users, but Firefox does allow smartphones to sync favourites, opened tabs, form information and passwords with a PC browser.
Another advantage is the “Do Not Track” function. According to a spokeswoman for the Mozilla project, Valerie Ponell, users can have the comfort of knowing they will not be tracked by such things as personalised online advertising.
In a test by the Australian internet portal Lifehacker, Opera Mini was the faster browser on the Android devices followed by Dolphin, the Android browser, Opera Mobile and Firefox.
And which browser has the nicest interface? The author of the test, Kevin Purdy, said Opera Mobile “possibly looks best of all the alternatives”.
If Apple had their way, only its own Safari browser could be used on the iPhone. But a couple of alternatives have made their way into the App Store. The Sphere software blends out all control panels and just shows the websites. In order to bring the command bar back, the iPhone only needs to be lightly shaken. Also widely distributed is the browser Mercury, which can open many pages in their own tabs and prepare different themes according to the tastes of the user.
If you want to display certain webpages on a different browser, Atomic offers this useful possibility when one wants to avoid the mobile version of a website. Atomic also offers tabs as well as the possibility of differentiating the functions of finger gestures on the display.
The iPhone browser Mango comes from Korea and has been praised in the App Store for its appearance and speed.
Blackberry users often use the Bolt browser as an alternative. The app supports the new web standard HTML5 as well as websites with Flash. In addition, there is also geo—data support so the user can use the GPS function and publish their current position on corresponding websites.
The integrated browser on Symbian mobile phones from Nokia does not have the best reputation. The newly—developed Ovi browser is supposed to be better and utilises an especially efficient technology to compress web data. As an alternative, there is Opera or the UC browser available for the iPhone, which displays a start page with often—viewed websites.
Symbian will not be the first choice for Nokia in the future as the manufacturers plan to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS on their smartphones — with the mobile version of Internet Explorer as the standard browser.
