Mac|Life - July 2010

>>>Apps

DISCOVER THIS MONTH’S MOST INTERESTING iPHONE & iPAD APPS!

IN SEARCH OF BETTER BROWSING

TIRED OF MOBILE SAFARI’S STUNTED WEB BROWSING? WORTHY ALTERNATIVES EXIST…BUT THERE’S A CATCH. BY MICHELLE DELIO The App Store’s loaded with browsers intended to provide a speedier, richer experience—after all, Mobile Safari leaves ample room for improvement. But with the exception of Opera Mini, all the competing browsers are built using the same WebKit code base (WebKit is the open-source browser engine at the heart of Safari), so any performance gains come from added features like improved tabbing, faster scrolling, image and ad blockers, and page compression. Still, some of these features are useful and contribute to faster, more efficient browsing.

Opera Mini processes web pages through its own servers, compressing and tweaking the pages for optimum performance before they get to your iPhone. The result is super-fast page downloads and occasional oddness in how pages are displayed. Sites you visit often are cached in part on your phone, making downloads even speedier.

But the most important factors in picking a
web browser are its feature set and how using
it feels. Opera Mini’s pre-processing feature
not only delivered pages quickly, it also
enhanced compatibility with sites that aren’t
iPhone-friendly. Its speed dialing lets you
choose sites to cache, then load with a tap,
and it also delivers an overview snapshot
of a site very rapidly. But opening new tabs
seemed slow compared to simply opening a
new page in Safari, and there’s just one level
of zoom. Some pages also loaded oddly—
random images were missing, and pages
were stretched into a rectangular format.
iCab Mobile’s tabs display is nicely
optimized for small screens thanks to its
Open Tabs page. You can specify whether
to open links on pages in a new tab, the
same tab, or in the background—great for
browsing link-heavy sites. Page content is
loaded in background tabs, so no annoying
delays drag things to a halt when you switch
to a new tab. You can also speed page
rendering even further by disabling image
downloads and blocking advertising. But
opening too many tabs in the background
crashed iCab, so stick to nine tabs
maximum, and you should be fine.

The configurable search options in Atomic Web Browser got us to our favorite search sites quickly, and the Search Current Page feature let us hone right into what we

running—its 1.2-second load time smoked the other browsers by 4. 5–5 seconds. When it comes to page-load times, though, a surprise winner emerged: Opera. It loaded our six test pages (MacLife, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and my link-heavy iGoogle page) a little more than 10 seconds faster than the other three third-party browsers and Safari, which all clustered in a spread with only 0.7 seconds separating them. Why is Opera trouncing its competitors here?