Mention the word “browser” and there is a fair chance that most people will think that you are talking about Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. A few (geekier than thou) might even think of Apple’s Safari and Opera. And with good reason. Between themselves, these ‘Famous Five’ (Sorry, Blyton) pretty much dominate the internet browser market.
However, it would be grossly unfair to assume that there are no browsers beyond these. In fact, there are a number of other applications that will let you surf the web and are quite capable of rubbing shoulders with their better-known alternatives—and in some cases, these even come with better features.
Flock
With just about everybody registered on some social network or the other, most people spend a lot of time accessing these resources while browsing the web. This gave some folk a bright idea: Why not create a browser that saves people the trouble of accessing such websites and which also delivers updates from within itself ? The result was Flock, which claims to be the world’s first social browser.
The highlight of the software are the sidebars that let you access and update your social networks (Facebook and Twitter as of now), while you browse the internet at a brisk rate.
Since Flock runs on Chromium—the same code that makes Google Chrome such a hit—it also means that most of the extensions made for Google will work just fine on this as well.
SeaMonkey Suite Contrary to what a number of people think, Firefox is not the only browser to come out from the Mozilla Foundation. The SeaMonkey Suite is a throwback to the Netscape Navigator days—packing an internet browser; an e-mail and newgroup client; and even an HTML editor to make sure that users have everything they need in one app.
Browsing speed is as good as it gets, which is not surprising as SeaMonkey uses the same source code that is used in Firefox.
Then you have tabbed browsing; add-ons from the SeaMonkey community (not in the same league as Fire-Fox, but still very handy); and feed detection that spots when a website has RSS or Atom Feeds. Just perfect for those looking for an ‘all-in-one’ online solution.
Maxthon
Given its feature set, it is a tad bit surprising that Maxthon is not more popular than it actually is (the homepage claims more than 500 million downloads).
While the browser offers all the features that most others do, it also throws in a very high degree of customisation, which allows you to easily tweak its toolbar, icons, menus and skins.
We also love the rename tab facility, which lets you change the name of an open tab; the mouse gesture support (letting you navigate around the web by just moving your mouse in a particular way) and the option to set which services you want to run when you start Maxthon.
The browser by itself is not the fastest, but the wealth of customisation more than compensates.
Epic
“The first-ever web browser for India” was the tag line used to market this software made by Bangalore startup Hidden Reflex. Firstly, its USP is undoubtedly its support for Indian languages and the Indian look and feel (there are more than a thousand Indian themes and wallpapers). And secondly, it comes with a nifty concept of a Sidebar, which allows users to run applications within the window even while browsing the Net. There is even an inbuilt word processor, letting you type away merrily in a small section of the browser, while you surf websites in the rest – very handy.
And thanks to the fact that Epic is based on Firefox, browsing speed is never an issue – and, of course, almost all Firefox extensions work with it.
Accuse us of being nationalistic, but we think this is one hell of a browser.
Camino
Most Mac users tend to go with Safari, the default browser that comes pre-installed on Apple machines. By doing so, they miss out on Camino, an opensource browser designed specially for Mac OS. In terms of performance, it gives Safari a run for its money with features such as tabbed browsing, RSS and Atom feed detection; support for the Mac OS X spellchecker, and—for those who like messing around with code—support for AppleScript.
We are not too sure if it beats Safari in the speed department, but it definitely better than Firefox and Chrome on the Mac.
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