I’ve been messing around with iChromy and Opera Mini, two free new Web browsers for the iPad that claim to be faster, leaner and more powerful than the standard Safari browser and the alternatives.
iChromy is my new favorite Web browser, and it now lives in the taskbar at the bottom of the iPad screen.[1]
It’s a Chrome clone for the iPad. Most importantly, iChromy replaces the dual address and search boxes in Safari with a single box, called the Omnibox, like in Chrome. That’s just the right way for browsers to work. It’s much more efficient.
The other thing iChromy has is a Reading List feature (iChromy calls it a “Readling List” — get a proofreader, quick!). With a single long-tap on a link, you can save that link to a queue accessible from a button on the toolbar. Tap on an individual link on that list and you open that page.
You can save pages to the Readling– um, Reading List by tapping an eyeglasses icon in the Omnibox. The Reading List also supposedly works for offline reading, but I haven’t tried it for that.
The Reading List works a lot better than tabs on the iPad for opening large numbers of pages at once. Tabs are great for opening a few pages, but the iPad 1, which is the one I have, doesn’t have enough horsepower to keep a lot of tabs open without crashing.
The other iPad browser I looked at is Opera Mini, also free. Opera Mini uses server caching of Web pages to load extremely fast, which is great. But I found it unusable because it defaulted to showing the mobile versions of sites, rather than the full desktop version.
My previous favorite Web browser for the iPad, until this week, was Cyberspace. It’s great for reading Web articles on the iPad, which is mainly what I do with an iPad Web browser. Cyberspace has big buttons to switch between the Instapaper reader-friendly article view and the regular page view. It also supports a page queue, like the Reading List in iChromy.
However, Cyberspace has some serious design problems. The search engine is something called DuckDuckGo rather than Google. Also, searches go to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” result; when you run a search, you often get a Web page rather than a page of results, and often that Web page is not the one you want. Drove me crazy.
- [1] Don’t read too much into that. I’m very fickle when it comes to favorite apps. I change up a lot. ↩
