When it comes to web browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google’s Chrome get all the attention. But they’re not the only web browsers on the market, nor are they necessarily the best.
While you’ve probably never heard of Flock, K-Meleon, and Maxthon, these three alternative browsers offer features so innovative that once you try them out, you just might feel compelled to add them to your permanent stable of web browsing tools. Find out why….
FLOCK
Flock bills itself as “the social web browser” and it has more hooks with popular web technologies than any other browser. With Flock’s “Accounts and Services” sidebar, for instance, you can aggregate and communicate with your friends from most of the popular social networking sites while you surf other sites. With the Photo Upload feature, you can either drag photos from your computer or select multiple images from a folder, and Flock will resize them and send them on to Picasa, Photobucket, or TinyPic.
If you have a blog you can add blog entries directly from Flock using the browser’s built-in Blog Editor.
Add links in the side panel to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and instant messaging in the same Accounts and Services sidebar, and Flock gives you nearly instant access to most of what you’re likely to be doing online today. Log on to a site that offers content or RSS feeds, for instance, and Flock will alert you to their presence, instructing you how to use the orange feed button to add the site to your list of feeds. Flock feels as fast and stable as IE or Firefox. IE users, in particular, will be able to adopt Flock with virtually no retraining, since most of the keyboard shortcuts – including those to access Favourites are identical.
K-MELEON
If what you want in a web browser is speed, along with a healthy dose of customizability, then K-Meleon will be worth your time. This little-known browser was launched specifically to be easy on system resources and therefore speedy where other browsers are not.
Even during installation, K-Meleon gives you the option of installing a pre-loader that promises to increase browser load times by keeping a portion of the browser’s code in memory at all times. Even without benchmarks, complex pages load noticeably faster than with either IE or Firefox, as both graphics and text appear almost simultaneously. Keyboard shortcuts and menus resemble those in Firefox.
A handy sessions menu allow you to save multiple browser tabs to one shortcut, meaning that if you regularly have 10 web sites open, you can reopen them all with one click. K-Meleon allows you to set up multiple user profiles so that each person who uses a computer can have a unique browser set up.
There are the usual browser-specific options that are accompanied by a host of advanced configuration settings, mouse accelerators, bookmark options, and view settings.
MAXTHON
Originally developed in China, Maxthon is different in some immediately noticeable ways, including its interface, which is bereft of the standard title bar, giving you more browser space in which to view web pages. Virtually everything about the interface can be customized. In this “no interface” mode, Maxthon is more Spartan even than Google’s Chrome. The effect makes Maxthon a notable solution for viewing web pages on small notebook screens.
Virtually every feature in the browser is accessible with the keyboard. You can even assign the function keys on your keyboard to open specific web pages, and you can create “web aliases,” which allow you to open a web site or groups of sites merely by typing a few letters or a word into the address bar. A unique Groups menu makes short work of saving a set of open tabs to a single shortcut. The browser also comes with some useful tools, including a full-featured form-filler, a flexible screen capture utility, a “file sniffer” that can help you find the web addresses of videos and a “collector” or notepad feature that can save your thoughts from session to session.
There’s a complete skinning system as well, which allows you to change the look and feel of the browser. Add it all up, and you have a browser that should have the major players taking notice.
COURTESY: GUARDING NEWSPAPERS LIMITED 2010
