India Inc. probably has one more achievement in the information technology sector.
Epic, the country's first browser launched recently in Bangalore, is the brainchild of Alok Bhardwaj, CEO, and Tejas Vyas, Chief Tech Lead, Hidden Reflex.
The two-year-old company is aware of the stiff competition in the browser world and banks on a wide range of India specifics that form the core features of Epic.
Besides being ‘Made in India,' Epic has a range of features that may attract the Indian web-users. The developers claim that it is the world's only free browser with anti-virus built in. The security apart, Epic boasts of a sidebar, which Mr. Bhardwaj refers to as the ‘multi-tasking sidebar.' This provides tabs for 20 various tasks, from logging on to Gmail, playing games to simply changing the ‘skin' of the browser. Epic comes with 1,500 different India-specific ‘themes' and wallpapers that can be added.
One even has the option of typing in 12 different Indian languages, besides Russian, Nepali, Greek and Arabic, and use it for emailing or uploading on any site. Indian languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu and Punjabi, are available. This may help to spread awareness of the Internet, but at the moment it is merely a typing device. It would have been a leap, if they had given an option of converting web-pages into those languages (at least one or two, to start with). This is now possible with various free applications available on the web.
Hidden Reflex's partnership with Web 18 enables Epic to have news headlines and the top 10 in music charts, among other things, as part of the sidebar application. The company also claims to have built in a word processor in the browser.
Epic is going to give the competition a tough time, says Mr. Bhardwaj. “It uses less memory than Google Chrome and is tested to be faster than Mozilla Firefox.” According to the Acid3 test, a test page from the Web Standards Project, Epic scores 91/100 compared with Mozilla and Chrome, which scored 93.
In the months to come, Hidden Reflex plans to get more Indian content, facilitate the use of more languages and get more live TV on Epic.
