A Few More Browsers?

Ben has already included links to two browsers, Opera Mini and Skyfire, and along with the S60 browser, that may more than you might need. But then again, maybe not, and if you poke around a bit you'll soon find there are a few more offerings. I downloaded as many as I could find and am pleased to say some work quite well.

Disclaimer: I'm not really qualified to perform a highly objective test, so what follows should be considered my highly subjective opinion and nothing more. I encourage all of you to try them and see if you like them any better than what you are currently using.


S60 (default browser): I know some people love to complain about this browser, but I’m hard pressed to offer anything terribly negative. It has a pretty busy default home page, but that’s easily customizable and it struggles with more videos than SkyFire, but then again, so does everything else. Besides who doesn’t like mini-versions of the pages that pop up and scroll when you navigate backwards? I say, all things considered, not a bad effort for Nokia.

(S60 Default Homepage)

(S60 Google Homepage)

Opera Mini: there are two versions available – 4.2 and the beta version 5.0. 4.2 was a solid browser which loaded and ran well enough (albeit, with the same video issue) but I dumped it when 5 was released, as I assumed it would be so much better. Sadly, that wasn’t the case, because in actual use the new version turned out to be buggy and clunky to navigate (yes, I realize it’s a beta version). Sorry Opera, it sure is pretty but with all the button pushing required to move from icon to icon, I’ll be reverting back to 4.2 even if you fix the bugs.

(Opera Mini 4.2)

(Opera Mini Beta 5)

Skyfire : This is a pretty remarkable browser and it is hands-down the best browser for watching videos. It eats everything that you throw at it and for the most part doesn’t ask you to save anything to your memory. It is reported to be a power-hog but it’s still a must-have app.

Bolt - Big claims from the website about fast loading and operation. I found it loaded quickly and has clean interface. It performed routine searches well and was quite snappy when downloading pages. Videos were less promising however. The initial attempt to play a video will launch a video wizard to determine what settings to use for playback. The first option doesn’t play anything, the second option will stream the video but not the sound, and if for some strange reason you decide neither of those options is appealing, then it defaults to the third option which is to download the video to the phone and play it with Real Player. In the end, this will probably stay on my phone since I like the interface and it is fast, but I’d prefer not to have to download videos that I’m most likely going to have to delete later anyway.

UCWeb6 - As to be expected the navigation is slightly different, with a little less polished interface perhaps, but still intuitive. It is, however, possibly even faster than Bolt with respect to page loading (sadly, I couldn’t quite get it play the same video or even download it). I think eventually I’ll decide if I like this or Bolt and then dump the other one.

BigBrowser - I’m not sure if this is a serious attempt at a browser or not, since there is no link to it on the developer’s site and it’s mentioned on other sites as being “…developed by CodeFlakes to experiment with the embedded browser object”. Whatever that means, I can only guess, but it appears the main goal was to maximize screen space. Which it does by getting rid of pretty much everything that might be helpful to navigation. To that end, there is no task bar and very little in the way of menu assistance. In theory you get the full screen viewing with no distractions. But in actual use I found myself not quite sure what the browser was doing most of the time and that led to repeated button pushing. I’m sure with a little more time I could remember how to get around, but until that happens the experience is a bit unsettling. I’m not recommending this as much as letting you know it’s out there and that it works on the E71x.

Teashark : This browser has a cool tiger-in-a-green-orb icon, but beyond that I can’t say much, because even though it would install, I could never get it to initialize. Further snooping about makes me believe this may be dead in terms of development, but then again you never know, so if anybody has better luck keep us posted.

Ozone: Another near hit. It looks promising from the website, but during the install I got an expired certificate error, so I reset the date on my phone. That did the trick to get it to install, and it even launched. Unfortunately as soon as I tried to search I got a failed to load error. This looks like it’s still in development so it might be worth keeping track of.

(Ozone Error Page)

JB5: This pops up when you search for Symbian and Browser, but I couldn’t seem to find the E71 listed so I decided not to push my luck…

One final note: I was going to include the Google Mobile browser in the list but as far as I can tell all this does is provide a different home page with links to the other mobile apps and as soon as you search for anything, the S60 browser opens up with the results and takes over from there. It seems to me it would make more sense to just set the S60 browser’s home page to the Google mobile home page and then eliminate the annoying pop-up that comes along with the app.

(Idle Screen Pop-up)

(BTW, back-space actually launches the app...)