Most part of our daily lives involve internet now. Browser is the tool which determine our browsing experience and productivity. If you have tried Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome but none of them meet your needs, you should check out these 5 alternative browsers which are very good but less known.
Some of them claim to be faster than any other browsers and some simply integrate social network into browsers. In this articles, i have personally tried many different browsers and pick the top 5 from all of them. One of them might be your perfect browsers.
1. Opera
Opera has a long history in web browsers business. It is always very innovative and supports most web standard. Just to name a few of its innovation, Opera is the first to bring us the speed dial, mouse gestures and most importantly, CSS! However, it never able to hit a huge market share in the war of browsers. Other unique features in Opera are:
- Opera Turbo – compress web pages for faster browsing on slower connection
- Opera Link – synchronization of profile, bookmarks, custom searches etc in the cloud
- Opera Unite – file sharing made easy using p2p
- Opera Mail – built in email client for easy multiple mail account management
2. Pale Moon
Pale Moon is a faster firefox clone for windows. It supports all add-ons of firefox, updates actively, looks, feels and smells just like firefox but only faster. The official states that Pale Moon is specially compiled to work best in windows and should be able to perform 25% faster than firefox. Personally, i feel that Pale Moon is a little bit faster than firefox in my own test. Well, you should try it and tell me how you feel.
3. RockMelt
RockMelt is the browser built for sharing and meant for social networking. It is built on top of Chromium – the same project which powers Google Chrome. Facebook is built into your browers, you will be logging into Facebook each time you fire up RockMelt. The browsing speed is pretty good as it is similar to Google Chrome but with tight integration of facebook/twitter.
The left side bar shows your Facebook friends for sharing links, chatting or checking their latest updates. The right side bar is a collection of feeds from twitter, your favourite websites and so on.
4. Flock
Flock is another social web browser that emphasizes on sharing. The latest version of Flock is built on Chromium as well. It is the first which comes up with the idea of social integration in web browser. As expected from Chromium, the browsers is speedy and web pages loading is fast.
The right side bar is your updates from your social network sites and feed content. Each activity in the sidebar has options for joining the conversation instantly.
5. Maxthon
Maxthon was originally developed in China with the idea of making a browser with a better than Internet Explorer. It was hugely popular in China. It is the only browser designed for the whole web. Dual display engines (powered by Trident and Webkit) and the web’s fastest Javascript engine (V8). The official claims that it recognize and load older, non-standard pages faster than any other browser.
That’s all for my top 5 alternative browers round-up. If none of the above suits you, you should consider the new Firefox 4 beta and Internet Explorer 9.
Did i miss any browsers that you feel it should be on the list? Tell me how you feel with these browsers as compared to your current default browsers.
