Epic Browser 1.2 : India’s first-ever Web-Browser

We had received an e-mail announcing the release of Epic Browser 1.2. For those who doesn't know about Epic browser, Epic browser is India's first-ever web browser developed by a Bangalore based Internet company "Hidden Reflex". Epic has already cleared more than 500,000 downloads in 178 countries.

• Epic has support for more than 12 Indian languages
  
• It includes more than 1500 apps such as gmail, twitter, facebook, orkut, travel, job, yahoo messenger, gtalk, cricket and games
• This is the first browser which has antivirus and antispyware integrated with it
  
• It has more than 1500 wallpapers and themes
• you can directly access My Computer
  

In newer version of epic, Hidden reflex mainly focused on Epic's speed and Security. These are the two things users always look for in web browser.

Epic 1.2 is faster, leaner and more powerful.

Here are the primary changes done in Epic 1.2.

Faster Load Times: Nearly 20% faster start-up times and faster rendering.

One-Click Super-AntiVirus Scan for file Downloads: When you download a file in Epic, you'll have an option to scan the file first via VirusTotal, our partner. They'll check if the link is considered malicious and scan the linked-to file with 40 different anti-virus engines including Symantic/Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, K7, AVG, Avira, Panda and 33 other a-v products! They have removed antivirus scanner which was causing instability.

Facebook, twitter with Popup Alerts: Complete facebook, twitter sidebar.

Hide-able sidebar: You can hide the sidebar for more browsing space.

Easy Access to Auto-Saved Text Fields: If your computer crashes while you were typing a long e-mail, Epic saves your text and nothing is lost!

I have been using it from last 3 months and let me tell you this is awesome. Speed is still a concern but I am sure it will improve in every version. Epic is "all in one" browser.

You can download Epic from it's official site http://www.epicbrowser.com/index.html. I have only one request to my readers, use it, give feedback and promote this Indian browser.

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Internet Explorer 9 : First look

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) is upcoming new browser by Microsoft. Microsoft has released its Beta version 3 days back on 28^th October. Internet Explorer 9 is Hardware-accelerated HTML5. Internet Explorer 9 moves rendering of text and graphics from the processor, to the graphics card. That means, your website’s contents/images will be clearer and video will play smoother on Internet explorer – 9. When I first came to know about IE9, I had few questions in my mind.

1. is it fast enough?
2. is it compatible with different versions of windows?
3. What are the new security features in this new browser?
4. is it good/cool enough to win back former IE users who have migrated to Firefox, chrome and other browser?

Geek’s review:

The first thing which disappointed me a lot, was the system requirements. IE9 is not supported in windows XP & is only for windows 7 and Vista (32 and 64 bits). Thus answering to my 2nd question of compatibility. Sadly Microsoft has ignored its best OS the Windows XP. How hard is it for Microsoft to make a version compatible to windows XP? I still do not understand why Microsoft is wasting money and time on Vista & why Microsoft wants to kill windows XP?

Any way you can download its beta version from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide, the size of the installer is around 19 MB and installation is very slow, frustrating and forces you to restart your system after installation. But in the end I was able to install it on my laptop.

First look of IE9:

Ya, it's impressive. It is clean, simple and very minimalist. The address bar box works both as address bar and the search box. Browser options like home, file, history, bookmarks and tools are shifted to top right of the browser and represented by 3 icons only.

Pin website: IE9 has this very impressive feature to pin your favorite website in task bar as apps. You will just need to drag the favicon from the IE9 box down to your taskbar so that whenever you want to open this website just click on the icon in taskbar.

But how much is the use of this functionality is still to be seen? I really do not want to fill my task bar with different websites. Or my task bar space will not be enough for it. As a developer I would like to develop an app or add-ons which will show me the option to choose the website from pined websites when I do a right click on my task bar. Actually this will be very useful for the user if we integrate this option with “pin the website” feature. Regarding to website apps pining functionality I would say it’s new, refreshing but not much useful.

HTML-5 Test (How well does your website support HTML-5?) : Microsoft says that IE9 supports HTML-5 and CSS-3. But when I did html-5 test on http://www.html5test.com/ IE9 scored only 96/300 when firefox 3.6 scored around 130 and chrome scores 231 out of 300. IE9 is lacking behind in HTML-5 support by a huge margin in comparison to chrome and firefox. But ya, there is definitely an improvement from IE8 to IE9. IE 8 scores only 26 in HTML-5 test.

Speed/Security/other features: I can clearly see IE9 is faster than firefox 3.6 but slower than chrome. IE9 has no default ad blocker integrated with it. IE9 uses SmartScreen filter that warns you if the website that you are visiting contains threats.

Finally, Microsoft has realized where search box should be open when we press Ctrl-f. In IE9 it gets opened in the top of the browser just below URL bar, not like IE 8 which opens search bar in the middle of page.

Well, IE9 is cool, cleaner, simpler, fast and secure. Now all 3 browser giants are at equal level. Browser war is on now. This is a very good move by Microsoft to get back it's browser market share. It will be very interesting to watch how browser users will reply to IE9. For me, all three are equals now. I have more option now. But still my priority will be chrome-> Firefox -> IE9.

Write your IE9 experience or your questions about IE9 as comment to this post. Remember IE9 is still in Beta version. Use it on your own risk.

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