Top 5 mobile web browsers for better web experience
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Thursday, 02 December 2010, 14:58 IST   |    2 Comments
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Bangalore: Mobile web browsers differ greatly in terms of features offered on operating systems supported. They are optimized so as to display Web content most effectively for small screens on portable devices. This is the reason that more and more people want to install an easy-to-use mobile web browser into their mobile phones. The best can display most websites and offer page zoom and keyboard shortcuts, while others can only display websites optimizes for mobile devices. Here is a list of top five mobile web browsers that can give you an improved web experience in your cell phone. Opera Mini Opera Mini is one of the well-known mobile browsers and it can be used by any mobile phone. Opera Mini uses the Java ME platform and at the same time, the mobile device is also required to be capable of running Java ME applications. Apart from making surfing the internet faster, it also allows the user to experience photo-sharing applications and subscribe to RSS news feeds from his any website or blog of his choice. Opera Mini opens with a straightforward interface with a URL box, Google search box, Bookmarks box and History box. It manages to put it all in a short column that requires little scrolling. Opera pushes Web URLs to the cell through its own rendering engine and its own servers, so it scales and rearranges most complicated full-size Web pages into the handset's format without taxing the phone itself. Skyfire Skyfire is a suitable mobile web browser for Windows Mobile and most new Nokia phones. The key advantage of Skyfire is that the user can play Flash video at his cell phone. Since it uses the company servers for rendering, users are allowed to visit websites that other mobile devices can't. Incorporated is the SkyBar along the browser's footer which entails: 'Video', 'Explore', and 'Share'. While 'Video' sniffs out Flash video on a webpage and pops up a window when it finds a Flash video it can play, 'Explore' searches trending topics based on the topics the user has recently searched or created. 'Share' pops up easy sharing via other email and social apps installed on the Android phone. Like other browsers for Android, Skyfire supports Pinch to zoom (on Android 2.0 and above), Copy and Paste, Find on Page, multiple window browsing (up to 8, easy toggle), Bookmarks, Downloads, even a Report Broken Video feature. Safari Whether the user is connecting via Wi-Fi, 3G, or EDGE, Safari is a good choice. The high-resolution Retina display renders pages beautifully, with perfectly crisp text and bright, vivid graphics. The user can zoom in and out of websites and get a close look. Apart from that the user can also save and sync bookmarks and put his favorite sites on his Home screen. It's also best known for its pinch-zoom in and out feature, which makes zooming in on specific areas easy. Safari browser supports AJAX, but not Flash 9, so the user can't play Flash games. Compared to Skyfire, Safari is not that much quick. Skyfire loads most pages in under half the time it takes the Safari browser to load them in. Mozilla's Minimo Mozilla's Minimo is a version of the Mozilla web browser for small devices like PDAs and mobile phones. It can perform decent zooming, and has good style sheet (CSS) support. The browsing toolbar resides on the bottom of the screen and includes mobile-specific buttons for showing and hiding the address bar, increasing text size, and panning around the screen. Instead of navigating away from the home page, Minimo anchors it as the first tab by default. Google Android The Android browser gets an updated UI, the user can tap the address bar for instant searches, double-tap to zoom in on content wells. It is an integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine. It has optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGLES 1.0 specification.

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