I've been very busily working on my Web browsing-specific article for the iPhone Life Buyers' Guide. To back up my printed article on the Web browsers, I've found it necessary to update the main chart of my main browser comparison and feature chart. It's available at http://www.winmobiletech.com/sekalaiset/08232010iOSWebBrowsers.html .
As you can see from the bottom-most „General verdict?” row, I (still) recommend iCab Mobile the most. There are only few areas when some of the competition is better - e.g., Atomic at saving website-specific charsizes, which is just GREAT; or Journey and iBrowse, which, thanks to their – otherwise pretty restrictive, serial-only – tabbing mode, has a far more robust memory model with far less crashes on the iPad when you open more than three or four tabs.
As I'm in the middle of a very exhausting iPhone / iPad programming lecture (I'm the lecturer, of course), I don't think I'll have any time to publish an explanation for the individual rows this week. However, if you've been reading my Web browsing-related articles (and my PDF reader-specific one at http://www.iphonelife.com/blog/87/ultimate-pdf-reader-roundup), you'll find an answer to almost all your questions there until the full roundup text body is published. As usual, it'll be far more thorough than anything else ever published on the subject.
As usual, comments are welcome.
iBrowse feedback
Hi,
This is an amazingly complete list. It's great to see all this info in one place.
I hope you'll forgive me adding a few comments on my own browser iBrowse where I think you have missed some features!
Web Compression: Yup, we have it (using Google). Just turn on 'turbo mode' in the tab view.
Ad Filtering: Yup, we use a standard adblock list. Just turn on 'Block Adverts' in the tab view
Search: As you say, we just use text highlighting, but this doesn't require the page to reload. It is just done with javascript in place.
Lock Orientation: This is available in the main toolbar on the ipad, and in the extended toolbar (tap the up icon to see it) on the iPhone.
Also - in the next version (submitted to apple for approval on 17th Aug) I have added bookmark import. Either from google bookmarks, Delicious, Yahoo, or by adding a standard bookmark.htm file to the shared documents via iTunes - or by importing all links from any page on the web.
Finally, your conclusion for iBrowse. I'm quite happy with 'not bad at all' and the iPad recommendation. You mention 'lacks some essential features'
I'd love to know which missing features you think are essential.
-or to put it another way. If you were working on iBrowse, what would you add next?
thanks!
Thanks! I'll update the
Thanks! I'll update the chart. With the corrections you listed (and the bookmark import capabilities of the new version you've mentioned), I'll recommend it even more.
What I miss the most:
Download manager (or at least some kind of explicit downloading and, then, invoking external programs on the downloaded contents)
User-Agent faking
App password / locking (preferably with an additional Guest Mode a'la iCab)
Brightness decreasing
The n/a for locking stands for “no real importance on an iPad, unlike on the iPhone” - I should have elaborated on this.
BTW, are you using some special tricks (e.g., just removing the given UIWebView instance and just keeping its HTML + image input in the much less memory-hungry, original form?) to conserve memory and to avoid crashing, in which iCab and Atomic are way worse? Along with Journey, I've found your app the best in this respect.
iBrowse
thanks for the suggestions. I'll definitely have a think about how I might get them to work.
re memory, I don't know what the other apps are doing - but without doing anything special, I just try to be a 'good citizen' and clean up memory when the system asks me to.
so the first time it asks, I'll empty caches, the second time, I'll start throwing away rendered web views that aren't in current use, etc.
And of course I try to write the app to be conservative about memory usage generally so that the system is less likely to call me at all...
iBrowse
thanks for the suggestions. I'll definitely have a think about how I might get them to work.
re memory, I don't know what the other apps are doing - but without doing anything special, I just try to be a 'good citizen' and clean up memory when the system asks me to.
so the first time it asks, I'll empty caches, the second time, I'll start throwing away rendered web views that aren't in current use, etc.
And of course I try to write the app to be conservative about memory usage generally so that the system is less likely to call me at all...
BTW, do you plan to implement
BTW, do you plan to implement scriptlet support? iBrowse doesn't seem to support them at all.
Atomic web browser
Great chart! It is already very useful for those to choose their main browsers.
I am sure that you are still perfecting the chart, but I just want to help it by pointing out that Atomic Web Browser can actually run a search in page just by choosing 'Search Curent Webpage' instead of Google.
Atomic Web Browser has been my main browser after trying Perfect Web Browser and Vanilla Surf. But your chart makes me think to try out iCab in the future.
I look forward to reading the browser bible soon!
Thanks! It'll be out in 1-2
Thanks! It'll be out in 1-2 days – wanted to wait for the first beta of iOS 4.2 (which was released some 2-3 days ago and I love it on my iPad) so that I can test the new "find in page" functionality coming with the built-in Safari. Of course, I'll fully update the chart too - e.g. Aarde has received a lot of updates in the meantime, in addition to iCab, Atomic and some other browsers.