Epic – A Browser Crafted in Indian Culture Date:   Sunday , September 05, 2010 With over 450,000 downloads in less than a month of its birth, the success saga of India’s first-ever web browser, Epic continues. A brainchild of Alok Bhardwaj, CEO and Tejas Vyas, Chief Tech Lead, Hidden Reflex, Epic is powered by the browser giant Mozilla. Epic, as the makers claim, is purely Indian in nature with the themes, wallpapers, and everything else designed to provide a unique experience of Indian culture in every bit of a user’s expedition through the browser. The application called Indic supports almost 12 Indian languages which, as the makers hope, will encourage more Indians who don't speak/write English to come online and share their thoughts and ideas as effortlessly as English speakers. Epic has an inbuilt anti-virus protection in the browser powered by ESET, the first of its kind in the history of browsers. The ‘multi-tasking sidebar’ has a number of widgets such as skins, maps, jobs, news, gmail, yahoo, games and it has around 1500 free applications. The sidebar also contains social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Orkut. Hidden Reflex, the makers of Epic, hope to get all of India onto the browser and so far the downloads have been via social media and word-of-mouth. They are also promoting Epic through advertising, direct distribution onto PCs, and through grassroots network of Epic evangelists program. Commenting on the browser war and on Epic’s future, Alok Bhardwaj said, “We are a part of one of the giants as we're built on Mozilla. The giants aren't targeting a specialized browsing experience whether via security enhancements like a built-in antivirus scanner, productivity enhancements like our sidebar apps, or country customization like our support for India. We're delivering a really special browsing experience - the giants are delivering a fairly generic one at this point.” The current market of the Epic shows that the browser has been downloaded in 178 countries and as mentioned, has cleared 450,000 downloads in a month. Epic has launched an update recently and has another update coming up shortly. According to Acid3 test, a test page from the Web Standards Project, Epic scored 91/100 compared with Mozilla and Chrome, which scored 93 based on the evaluation of various features and performance status.