The One and only Real iPhone Web Browser Roundup

IMPORTANT NOTE (06/30/2009): there are several updates to this article you may also want to read. In order NOT to force you to re-read the entire original post, I never change the information included in it in any way; however, I do change the feature & comparison chart (the heart of the entire roundup) to reflect the latest changes.

A list of these updates (from the oldest to the latest):

Some additional remarks (06/22/2009): some additional clarifications on how to read the Safari column in the chart etc. I’ve also provided some links to my past, multiplatform, mobile (also covering the iPhone) Web browser-related articles and presentations, which are a great read for anyone wanting to know more of the pitfalls, problems of browsing the Web on mobile devices. NOTE: I no longer need the contact address of browser developers; I’ve already contacted any of them.

UPDATE (06/23/2009 0.37CET): an additional test of Arachnid 1.4.1 – a pretty mediocre browser. The browser is not recommended; therefore, you may want to skip this update entirely.

UPDATE (06/23/2009 22.15CET): the changes in 1.7.2 beta of iCab Mobile. With OS3 out, in the meantime, I had more time to test iCab under OS3 and found it incomparably more stable under the new OS than under OS 2.2.1. That is, the “iCab isn’t stable” comments in my original article are NO longer topical. (The chart, of course, no longer has these comments.)

NOTE: in the meantime, I’ve also received 1.8 with TONS of niceties like downloading files, in-app screen locking etc. I still don’t publish an update speaking of the new features as I’m still negotiating with the developer on the new features I’d really welcome in the browser (e.g., an Action / Open menu for downloaded files).

UPDATE (06/27/2009): a lot of new info:
- New versions of Mini Browser and Journey
- The comparison of online radio players also containing a built-in Web browser. NOTE: ooTunes Radio does support bookmarks (it’s just that they’re in the system-level Favorites), unlike what I’ve, at first, stated.

UPDATE (06/29/2009 3:23CET): Here, I’ve elaborated on how iCab Mobile, the best third-party browser works on a jailbroken iPhone 3G in a heavily Backgrounded-ized environment. I’ve also provided a comprehensive mini-tutorial (with direct, easy links to downloads) on how the iPhone 2G and 3G needs to be jailbroken, how to install Backgrounder etc.

UPDATE (09/Jul/2009): my report on the built-in Web browsers of Instant Messaging applications.


THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOLLOWS:


While the iPhone’s built-in Web browser, Safari, is a pleasure to use, it still has some missing functionality. Some of these:

- Full screen mode (browsing the Web without the upper and lower status and command bars taking up any screen estate)

- Orientation locking (to avoid Safari changing orientation when you move or turn your phone)

- An easier way to switch between open pages (now, it requires sometimes several taps / swipes to switch to another opened Web page)

- Background Web page loading (to avoid having to wait for a new page to be opened while going on reading the current one)

- Allowing for more pages to be open without having to continuously reload them (albeit Safari in the latest, just-released iPhone OS 3.0 certainly helped this)

- Configurable Web search engines

- To be able to quickly scroll to not only the top, but also the bottom of the page (for example to check out the latest posts in forums, blogs)

- Providing "faked" User-Agents to make Web servers think you’re accessing them from desktop browsers, and not an iPhone-based one

- Viewing page source

- Disabling image loading in order to speed up page loading times and drive down data use

Enter third-party Web browsers, which allow for the above. Let’s take a closer look at them – particularly because the existing, pre-OS3 roundups are heavily outdated – some of them have been published as early as this January – and no longer contain useful information.

First and foremost, as in my previous Web browser bibles for mostly Windows Mobile (see for example THIS), you’ll find most of the information you’ll need to know in the comparison & feature chart available HERE. It’s quite a huge one, so, it’s worth either printing it (in landscape mode) or viewing it on a desktop computer with as huge a screen as possible. After a quick introduction and evaluation of the reviewed browser, I devoted quite a lot of time to explaining what each row in the chart means and how the reviewed browsers behave in that respect. It’s in there that you’ll find a lot of additional information and tips.

First and foremost, there aren’t browsers for the iPhone not depending on the Safari / WebKit engine. What does this mean? There’re some fundamental restrictions (still, as of OS 3.0) plaguing Safari and, accordingly, all browsers based on it. The most important being the lack of text reflowing capabilities allowing for nicely reflow the text when you zoom into a page with pinching. Some other browsers (for example, later Opera Mobile 9.5+ versions) on other mobile platforms (in this case, Windows Mobile) do offer this functionality. This, unfortunately, also means there will still be some Web pages or forums almost impossible to read with Safari. Some of the examples are listed HERE (see "2.1 Real-world rendering tests"), in my article on how Safari compares to Windows Mobile Web browsers (and the multiplatform Opera Mini); for example, THIS Thinkpads.com thread.

Similarly, there isn’t full Flash (Lite) support either, something already existing on Symbian S60 (Flash Lite coming bundled / pre-installed with the Web browser) and Windows Mobile (a "hacked" version of Flash Lite 3 can be installed in some later Opera Mobile versions). This also means no online YouTube-alike works with iPhone OS 3 – not even the ones that do work with the Flash Lite 3-enabled Windows Mobile or S60.

NOTE: I had to take out an elaboration of some of the browsers because of the 10k char limit enforced by the forum settings. You can find the missing section at http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=329116&postcount=24

 

Too bad it uses Safari’s approach for selecting the page you want, and not a much denser, one-page list for much quicker selection:



It has no background loading capabilities either – and the lack of support for quickly scrolling to the top / bottom of the page is really annoying.

Its settings dialogs are as follows (as you can see, it’s packed with a lot of goodies):





CaizerWeb 1.0.2

The very ugly scrolling / dragging makes this title (which, otherwise, would be pretty nice) in no way recommended



Journey Web Browser 1.0

Pretty good and capable Web browser; too bad the scrolling speed / stuttering can be a real pain in the back. Therefore, not recommended.



BigBrowser+ 1.1

If you MUST store the downloaded files on your phone and make them accessible to an external computer, you’ll want to turn to this app.



File downloading in progress. Unfortunately, background downloading isn’t supported



As with all the other browsers, unsupported files (ZIP, WMV etc) can’t be downloaded.



Built-in file viewer; at the bottom, you can see the address you need to connect to from an external browser to be able to access / download your files / pages.

fgBrowser 2.5

It would be nice if and only if it supported multiple documents.

Main menu view:



Favorite / history view; as can be seen, it supports ordering history items really nicely:



iBrowseTwo 1.1.0

Really-really incapable: not even landscape is supported. Don’t bother.



The only menu it has (address input):



Mini Browser 1.0

Don’t bother.



(with the main menu maximized)



(and with it minimized)

QuickSurf 1.2

Really nothing to write home about – except for it not loading / displaying images (which is also supported by some other browsers – but, of course, not Safari):

 

Multi-Full Browser 1.1.0

Another very weak title.



(four pages at the same time)



(and after switching to two)

A more thorough comparison and explanation of the chart

Now, let’s take a closer look at the chart. Note that in order to make the most out of this section, you’ll want to open the chart in a separate tab / window so that you can avoid scrolling.

Landscape support?: The first row of the group explains whether a given browser supports switching into landscape orientation at all. As you can see, not all do; for example, (the, otherwise, not recommended) iBrowseTwo (at least in its current, 1.1.0 version) and the absolutely rubbish Mango Browser are incapable of Landscape. The non-recommended "Wide Web with Twitter" doesn’t depend on automatic orientation change (unlike the other, Landscape-capable browsers) – you must manually switch orientation.

Lock orientation?: several third-party browsers support locking the (current) orientation. While Safari does allow reading Web pages in bed in landscape orientation while you’re on your side (if you make sure the side with the speaker is down, and not the other one – that is, the side with the Home button),

1. some browsers allow for dynamically changing orientation in all the four directions (not just three, as is the case of Safari and practically enabling in-bed, on-side reading without any orientation locking). This also means you can’t use them in situations like the above (you’d want to browse the web while you’re lying on your side).

2. You’re doing some physical exercise (running, bicycling in a gym etc), or just can’t continuously browse; for example, you’re talking to someone or walking the street and, consequently, you often put your phone in your pocket for a moment. To avoid the constant switching between the portrait and landscape orientations (and the waiting a bit for the orientation to restore when you take your iPhone back to your hands), you might want to disable automatic orientation change.

In both these cases, locking the orientation can be of immense help.

Tab / multidocument support: It’s very important, particularly over slow(ish) and/or expensive connections or on slow(er) devices, that you can keep as many web pages open as possible.

For example, when you encounter a link you’d like to follow on a Web page, when you return from it, Safari reloads the previous (original) page, which may take quite a lot of time (and data use). In this case, it’s preferable to open the link on a new tab (of which the Safari has 8) and, by forcing it to load the page in the new tab, don’t let the iPhone "forget" the original page.

There are two major groups of 3rd party browsers: ones that allow for multipage / multitab work, and ones that don’t. Unless you really don’t want to use multitabs (because the additional time / data usage doesn’t annoy you), you’ll want to go for browsers belonging to the former group. You, in addition, will want to learn how to use these features as efficiently as possible to minimize page switching and wait-until-page-is-loaded time. As usual, there’s a "+" sign with browsers supporting multiple tabs (windows) open at a time and a "-" sign with ones that don’t.

How many taps to switch between tabs?: if you do use multiple tabs, it might be very important to be able to switch between them as easily and quickly as possible. On tabbing-enabled desktop Web browsers, for example, all you need to do is either pressing Crtrl-Tab or just clicking the tab in the upper command bar of the screen. Of course, on the iPhone, there’re no keyboard shortcuts and, because of the limited screen estate, there aren’t visible tab thumbnails either. That is, you will always need to issue sometimes multiple screentaps to switch between tabs (open documents).

Some browsers, while (to conserve screen estate; that is, not to take up 20-30 additional vertical pixels to display the list of tabs) they don’t display the title of each tag, provide one or two arrows to quickly switch between tabs. These allow for one-tap switching between consecutive(!) tabs. Some others have gestures (for example, double swipes to the left / right as in Journey Web Browser 1.0) to do the page switching. Others allow for a quick list of tab titles upon tapping an icon. These, therefore, allow for switching pages with two taps. Finally, the built-in Safari (and several third-party browsers) only allow for page switching requiring much more taps and swipes. An example: if you have six tabs open and you’d like to open a seventh from tab one (the leftmost one in the tablist), you’ll need to swipe the tablist right several times to get back to the old tab. This isn’t at all elegant or easy – the approach taken by the "tab title list on one screen"-enabled browsers is certainly superior.

An example of an, in this regard, vastly superior browser, Air Browser:



As you can see, it both has a quick tab title list (one tap to activate any tab) and two dedicated arrows for switching to the previous / next tabs.

Open links in background tabs (no need to switch back to continue reading the current page while the other is still loading): currently, as of iPhone OS 3.0, you can only open links in new tabs when you long-tap (about one second) a link:



(Note that this is only available in OS 3, not in previous versions!)

That is, there’s no way to instruct Safari to open the link in a new, so-called background tab, which would allow for staying in the current document (going on reading it) and only switching to the new page when you’re absolutely sure it has fully been loaded. This way you can save a LOT of time if you take into account that pages, in general, require several seconds to load / render. For example, I always (try to) switch back to the original page when doing this – which, in Safari, requires a LOT of screentaps.

More advanced browsers like iCab Mobile have a link tap context menu item "Open in background tab". If you tap them instead of "Open link normally / in this tab / in a new tab", you both preserve the current document (no need to reload it when you return to it AND you can continue reading it while loading the new page in the background) and don’t lose time waiting for the new page to load (staring at the empty or partially rendered screen) or switch back to the current one:



Unfortunately, very few other browsers support them same. Mostly because of this feature, iCab Mobile, which has a lot of other goodies, would be one of my most recommended browsers if it didn’t crash so frequently.

Default "open to" definable?:

In some browsers, should be there no way of deciding for each (tapped) link where they should open, you can define where, by default, they should open their content to. For example, VanillaSurf 1.2 lets define in Settings:



So does iCabMobile:



If you set this, you don’t need to select all the time whether to open the new page to the current or a new tab.

 

Memory use: does it keep all opened pages in memory; test suite results : in order to make real advantage of multitabs, you also need a browser with good memory handling.

If you’ve ever used multiple tabs in pre-OS3 Safari, you know why: in previous operating system versions, Safari notoriously killed the contents of opened tabs if the new one was larger than a specific threshold. (With the Safari in OS 3.0, this problem is still existing but seems to be far less pronounced – nevertheless, some 3rd party browsers still fare much better in this respect.)

In order to make the test as strict and reproducible as possible, I’ve used my old Web page I’ve purposefully made for memory usage and page load time measurements for my previous Web browser reviews and roundups.

This Web page is almost 600 kbytes long. I’ve created multiple copies of it to avoid "caching" and browsers’ only using one memory representation for all tabs instead of one for each tab; just change index.html to index2.html, index3.html … index6.html to access them.

In order to find out how many tabs can coexist, I’ve opened as many instances of these Web pages in different tabs and, after fully loading each tab, I’ve iterated over the previous ones to see whether they still have the Web page, or, do they start reloading pages. As you can see, in this respect, by far the worst (multitab-enabled) browser is Air Browser 1.1; all the other was able to keep much more pages in memory. Unfortunately, the new, OS3.0 Safari is in the lower half of the bunch (with only four pages), while some of the alternatives (most importantly, VanillaSurf) had no problems keeping eight pages in memory.

At the same time, I was also able to find out how many pages are needed to "crash" a given browser. Unfortunately, several, otherwise high-quality browsers (iCab Mobile 1.5, CaizerWeb 1.0.2 and Journey Web Browser 1.0) crash when you "overburden" them with too many tabs / mmory-consuming Web pages open.

No, don’t think, based on the test page’s length (600 kbyte) and consequent memory needs (which is, according to my measurements on the Windows Mobile platform, can range from 2 to 16 Mbytes – that is, much larger than the original HTML page itself), you can safely use these three browsers to browse only few, smaller Webpages concurrently. The figures I’ve provided only show when the browser crashed in a well-controlled environment with known Web pages. Upon casual browsing far smaller(!) pages, I’ve encountered frequent crashes too (far more frequent ones than Safari crashing – it still does! – under OS3), pretty easily ruling out these three browsers. On the other hand, VanillaSurf 1.2 has never ever crashed on me. Too bad it lacks some essential features…

Test page loading time: along with the memory usage tests (loading the large test suite), I’ve also benchmarked it loading the page in the first and, then, second, third etc. tabs. I’ve found out that loading the page in the first tab takes far more time than in the consequent ones; for example, with iCab Mobile, 18 seconds for the first page and between 7 and 8 seconds for subsequent ones (hence the 18/ 7…8 listed in this row). This must have been caused by the test pages, while physically different (and, therefore, loaded separately), sharing the same image resources. That is, the latter didn’t needed to be fetched again.

As you can see, interestingly, Safari has turned out to be the worst-performer of the (multitabbed) bunch. This means the related promotions (see for example BigBrowser+’s iTunes page and ad) are indeed true: if a developer states his or her browser can load pages faster than Safari, then, he’s indeed right.

Can you select where to open it in some kind of a runtime context menu?: when discussing Default "open to" definable? above, I’ve already explained some browsers (including Safari starting with OS3 – but not before) allow the user decide where a tapped link should be opened.

The ways of activating this context menu is different. For example, with Safari, a single, short tap opens the page in the current tab (unless the link forces the browser to open it in a new one), while a long (about one second) tap brings up a context menu where you can select whether you want to open the page in the current tab or a new one – or, alternatively, whether you want to copy the link address.

On the contrary, in iCab Mobile 1.5, you need to use short-taps (and not long ones!) to activate the full context menu of the browser (as long as you’ve set "Ask" for the default link target in Settings). If, on the other hand, you tap the links continuouy for at least one second, you’ll be presented Safari’s own menu, without the option to open the page in a new tab.

Titles of all tabs easily accessible?: I’ve shown how Air Browser 1.1 makes it easier to select the tab to switch to (as opposed to the several-taps-and-swipes-needed Safari approach). In this row, I elaborate on how the browsers behave in this respect – that is, do they have easily accessible and selectable lists of tabs.

As you can see, Air Browser 1.1, iCab Mobile 1.5 and CaizerWeb 1.0.2 are the best in this respect. VanillaSurf 1.2, the most recommended browser (because of its stability, not because of its feature set, in which it is definitely worse than some of the other browsers!), unfortunately, uses the same slow and awkward interface as Safari.

Max. number of tabs: here, I’ve listed how many tabs the browser have. As can be seen, (multitab-enabled) browsers generally support several tabs; the two exceptions being (the, otherwise, in no way recommended) iBrowseTwo 1.1.0 and Multi-Full Browser 1.1.0.

The Search group elaborates on local / global searching support. Its first row, Find in page? If not, compatible with my scriptlet?, tells you whether you can have the same functionality as Ctrl-F in esktop browsers. It might be very important to find a certain word on a huge Web page. Find in page, when implemented, allows for this.

Unfortunately, few browsers have this functionality – the biggest names (for example, VanillaSurf and Safair itself – while iCab Mobile does support it) don’t.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though – with Safari, you can enable this functionality with so-called "scriptlets". Please see THIS for more info and how they should be used.

Built-in Web search engine support?: in Safari, there’s a text input field to the right of the address input bar, which provides you with an easy way to quickly issue Google (or, if you reconfigure it in the system-level Settings, Yahoo) searches without having to go to Google (Yahoo)’s homepage first. Here, I’ve listed whether the browsers do the same.

Favorites: Access Safari favorites?: The new, Favorites group explains how the browsers handle favorites. Some don’t even have any favorite support (you will want to avoid these altogether), some are pretty advanced.

The first row in this group, Access Safari favorites?, explains whether the browser is able to operate on Safari’s own favorites (none of them are, except for, of course, Safari itself). In this row, I’ve also explained some of the niceties; for example, iCab Mobile’s excellent capabilities (export / import and reading the system-level Contacts database).

Bookmark name editable?: you, at times, may want to store a favorite with a modified name (not bearing the title of the page). Here, I explained which of the browsers are capable of this.

URL editable: you may also want to edit URL’s themselves. At first, this doesn’t seem very important. However, if you take Javascript scriptlets into account (see the link in Find in page? If not, compatible with my scriptlet? above for more info), this may become REALLY important.

Favorite folders?: examines whether you can define subfolders. Note that some of the browser that, otherwise, allow for subfolders, only allow them in the depth of one – I’ve also elaborated on this in the chart.

Support for reorganization?: when you have too many items, you might want to reorganize them – for example, bring the most used ones (along with, if you do use them, "find in page", "bottom of the page" etc. scriptlets) to the top so that you can quickly access them without having to scroll down a lot.

In addition to Safari, of the higher-quality titles, iCab Mobile 1.5, CaizerWeb 1.0.2 and Journey Web Browser 1.0 support this kind of functionality. Reorganization is done in exactly the same way in all these browsers: you tap-and-hold the icon (the three horizontal lines stacked) on the right of the favorite and, then, drag the record to its new position.

History? : This group lists whether there’s support for history (user-input addresses) and whether the stored data is actively used when you enter something starting with the same of containing some substring (URL autocomplete based on history?) and you can delete the history data (Clear history?), should you not want people see what pages you’ve visited.

 

Scrolling : Scrolling smoothness?: the Scrolling group elaborates on issues with scrolling. The first row in this group, "Scrolling smoothness?", elaborates on whether scrolling is smooth.

Unfortunately, all third-party browsers are definitely worse than Safari in that the scrolling, to some degree, stutters on them. The difference can be very small (as is the case of iCab Mobile 1.5 and VanillaSurf 1.2). Some (otherwise, high-quality) browsers, unfortunately, exhibit pretty bad scrolling stuttering; the most important examples of them are CaizerWeb 1.0.2 and Journey Web Browser 1.0. You’ll want to avoid them entirely if you find this problem really annoying.

Quick scrolling to top / bottom of document?: on the iPhone (as opposed to some other, touchscreen-enabled platforms like Windows Mobile Professional / Classic), there’re no draggable scrollbars to quickly scroll up / down to the top / bottom of the page (or, for that matter, anywhere inside the page). If you know Opera Mini on compatible platforms, you may also remember that it also offers quick scrolling to the top / bottom on non-touchscreen platforms too with repeated pressings of #3.

With Safari (and some other 3rd party Web browsers), you can quickly and easily browse to the top of the page by simply single-tapping the top of the screen. The opposite of this (quick scrolling to the bottom), however, is only implemented in very few browsers – and, unfortunately, Safari isn’t one of them.

Again, my scriptlets to the rescue! As is explained in the (first) UPDATE section of THIS article, you can easily create a scriptlet, which, when activated, quickly scrolls down to the bottom of the page.

Cookies: Clear cookies?: some browsers allow for clearing cookies, should you be afraid of privacy issues.

Fine-tuning acceptance?: In addition, Safari allows for fine-tuning (in the system-level Settings menu) them.

Misc.: Interrupting page loading?: the first row of the Misc. (miscellaneous) group concentrates on whether you can interrupting (stop) loading a page. Say you only need the text of a page and, when it’s already rendered, you want to stop loading the in-line images. If the browser doesn’t support this, you’re shot.

Full screen?: the built-in Safari doesn’t support full screen mode (not even in OS 3.0). This is the problem that made most 3rd party browser developers embark on developing their own browsers.

In this row, I elaborate on whether the full screen mode (if supported) is really full screen mode (where you can exit from either shaking the phone or, as with fgBrowser, some special three- or two-finger gestures) or one where you’re still shown icons to exit the full screen mode. Of course, you may want to prefer browsers that offer true full srcreen mode. As you can see, again, iCab Mobile is the best in this respect – it doesn’t display any icons and entirely operates based on shaking.

Remembers last visited page(s) upon relaunching?: some Web browsers automatically reload the last page (or, when in multitabbed mode, even pages – as is the case with VanillaSurf 1.2) when you relaunch them.

Interaction with Safari (passing a link to / receiving a link from): in cases, you may want to pass the address of a given page to Safari so that you can continue browsing the Web in that browser. (The opposite is true in very few cases.) Note that, now with OS3’s supporting copy/paste operations, this isn’t that important a functionality any more.

User-Agent faking?: in some cases, you may want to "fake" your User-Agent HTTP request header telling the Web server you’re browsing pages from you’re from another Web browser, not Safari on the iPhone. Very few Web browsers support this.

Nevertheless, if you really need this functionality with, say, Safari, you can use third-party some sites effectively changing your User-Agent – which is also a widely used practice of Opera Mini users.

File download?: in Safari (and most 3rd party browsers), when you tap a link pointing to for example a PDF, DOC, MP3, MP4 or other file otherwise supported by iPhone (that is, the phone can play it back or render its contents), it will invoke the application assigned to the particular file type straight away – without storing the files in the file system so that you can, later, play it back without having to download it again.

Of the tested browsers, only one (BigBrowser+ 1.1) is able to not only "Open" (see the above-explained, default functionality), but also "Save" these files into the file system. (This browser, otherwise, is pretty basic; I only recommend it for file saving.)

View source?: only one browser (Journey Web Browser 1.0 ) makes it possible to view the source of a Web page.

Copy-paste?: back in the pre-OS3 pages, probably the most important feature missing from the operating system was copy/paste. This was of special interest in the Web browser, as it’s mostly there that you may encounter text you’d like to quickly paste into your notes or mail.

Before OS3’s radical changes, you only had two ways of fixing this: first, mailing the address of the current Web page (this is supported by almost all browsers, including Safari), or, going for the very expensive ($6) and, comparatively, weak Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) – the only Web browser to have reduced (it’s only able to copy full blocks of texts and to mails and the address bar only) copy/paste support. If you were lucky enough, with some kinds of content, you could use third-party scriptlets: for example, if you needed copy/paste functionality to convert non-HTML links to HTML ones (so that they become activatable and can be followed) with, for example, the Linkify scriptlet HERE.

Can image loading be disabled?: particularly when you’re on a slower connection or you need to reduce your data usage (images can eat up pretty much data), you may go straight for a client that supports disabling images. The majority of third-party browsers do so; unfortunately, Safari doesn’t.

Offline browsing?: there’s one browser that allows for automatically reading back the pages that were open last time you have exit: VanillaSurf.

Note that the two browsers that allow for Web page saving (BigBrowser+ 1.1 and Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) 2.5) also allow for this – to some degree: they don’t save images.

Save web pages?: See the above explanations about saving a Web page so that it becomes offline.

Auto forms fill-in?: another welcome addition in the OS3 Safari is the form autofill. In order to have an idea of other mobile browsers’ supporting the same, I need to point out that none of the Windows Mobile Web browsers have the same (except for, probably, SkyFire, which I haven’t tested in this regard so far), and the same stands for the BlackBerry and Symbian S60.

https support? (ebay test): some Web browser developers state there’s no HTTPS (Secure HTTP) support in some browsers. This is why I’ve run a HTTPS test too with eBay (and, at the same time, I was able to test whether cookies are retained over browser restarts). All the browsers that I’ve tested in this regard turned out to be supporting HTTPS.

Input keyboard: the one with ".com"?: one browser (Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) 2.5) present the user an on-screen keyboard not specially tailored for entering Web addresses; for example, it lacks the .com button.

Ad filtering?: some browsers support ad filtering. The most important of them is iCab Mobile 1.5, which allow for even manual editing of filters – excellent!

 

Yup, the chart contains info on both 2.2.1 and 3.0 Safari, separated by a slash.

 

Some additional remarks (06/22/2009):

1. The tests have been conducted on the iPhone 3G under both OS version 2.1.1 (jailbroken) and OS 3.0 (non-jailbroken). In the column for Safari, I’ve included both information, separated by a slash (/).

2. On the new iPhone 3G S (which has both two times more RAM memory and a much faster processor), the loading speed should be better and some stated Safari is able to keep much more pages in memory. This may also mean the 3rd party browsers, which crash on the 3G, run OK on the 3G S – I couldn’t test this as here in Europe the 3G S will only hit the shelves in July. As soon as it arrives here, I purchase one and re-run the tests.

3. You may also be interested in some of my past, mobile Web browsing-related articles and speeches; for example,

My W3C speech on multiplatform mobile Web browsing + a full explanation - probably the most important one

FULL ROUNDUP: Browsing the Web on Windows Mobile just like on iPhone, incl. IEM6 review - a lot of comparison between the iPhone way of Web browsing and that on Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile Web Browsing Bible - strictly Windows Mobile-related; still, it has a good deal of info


4. If any of you has a direct contact to the developer of each 3rd party app, let me know. I’d like to discuss what they should do with their browsers and also post updates to this roundup as soon as they have implemented some bugfixes / improvements – and I would really welcome their knowing about the bugs I’ve found.

5. As with my previous Web browsing related articles, you may want to spend some hours scrutinizing my comments, particularly in the chart. The chart (and the comments) contain a lot of practical tips like “how do I open a page in the background?”, “how do I disable image loading” etc. Nevertheless, if you want to have tips explained in a much more verbose (and easier / digestable) way, check out the next issue of US-based papermag ‘iPhone Life’, where I may come up with a full article with tons of practical tips like these.

 

Hard to say... if iCab Mobile is fixed, crash-wise, it's easily by far the best browser. Now, because of the crashes, I don't really recommend it. (Dunno whether it runs better - crashes less - on the 3G S because of the bigger RAM. It's next to useless on both my jailbroken 2.2.1 and my non-jailbroken 3.0 3G because it tends to crash very frequently.)

Currently my pick is VanillaSurf - not because of its features (in which it's clearly worse than iCab Mobile) but because its overall stability.

 

Great to hear other folks think the same of these apps - that is, I did a worthy and dependable work.

 

Yup, User-Agent faking is very easy to implement. In the meantime, I've looked up the contact addresses of most developers and was also able to send them a mail; I'll also ask them whether they plan to implement this. And, if they don't, I'll try to persuade them.

 

UPDATE (06/23/2009 0.37CET): I’ve tested Arachnid 1.4.1, a recently-released browser with multitab support. I’ve found it pretty mediocre: other titles are definitely better. For example, it doesn’t in any way support opening a link in a new tab.



Furthermore, it has major memory problems (comparable to Safari and much worse than most of the other tabbed browsers), can’t run scriptlets and doesn’t have goodies like disabling image loading.

I've accordingly updated the chart.

 

Thanks for mentioning it - I've tested it. See my previous update.