I just wanted to share this as I ran across it yesterday. I never gave much thought to an alternative browser on the iPhone. Safari’s kind of right there and it just never occurred to me how unhappy I was with it. But then a few things came to mind. Things like:
- There’s no tabbed browsing
- When switching between open windows the entire page will annoyingly refresh, even if you don’t want it to
- There’s no way to download files and store them on the iPhone
Incredibly, it turns out there’s been a an App Store approved browser, Vanilla Surf (iTunes link) that boasts all of these features and more such as:
- Full-screen browsing
- De-activate loading of pictures
- Ad-blocker
I’ve only spent a little bit of time with it so far, but it seems like a winner. I will say I did have it crash on me once, but that may be due to my iPhone being jailbroken and eating up more memory than it ought to rather than a problem with the app. My understanding is that all 3rd party browsers in the App Store are required to be built upon the Safari framework, but with a boatload of features that probably should have been in Safari, it’s easy to recommend Vanilla Surf so far. I mean, we no longer have to be forced to use an operating system’s browser on a PC, so why should we tolerate it on a mobile platform? So enjoy your tab-switching, non-forced-refreshy goodness!
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