The One and only Real iPhone Web Browser Roundup

UPDATE (08/13/2009 23:48 CET):

1.) A new version of VanillaSurf has been released.

Unfortunately, its biggest problem is still discernable (and definitely making it on slower devices – anything before the iPhone 3G S – really frustrating): the stuttering. It’s really visible and downright annoying on the 3G. On the 3G S, the situation is far better but I would still not recommend it – iCab Mobile is far-far smooter (and, now, with version 1.6, also more power- and featureful, as opposed to early versions running under OS versions before OS3). Or, even Oceanus (to be reviewed in the next bullet).

2.) I’ve tested Oceanus too. (So far, I wasn’t able to do this as it’s not available in our local AppStore and, consequently, I couldn’t purchase it.) The current, tested version is 1.3.

First, let’s compare it to the, in my opinion, best third-party Web browser available, iCab Mobile 1.6.

The pros of Oceanus:
- Auto-scroll (if you’ve ever used Mobipocket Reader on any mobile platform, you know what this is; in addition, you can dynamically change the scroll speed or just stop scrolling with one screentap only with the on-screen controls)
- Tilt-scroll (very nice too)
- Built-in support for using compressing & content stripping services greatly lowering data use and increasing page loading speed. (These, however, do make pages one-column by destroying their original contents – along with all their scripts and objects like YouTube inline videos).

The cons of Oceanus:
- No “where to open to” link context menus. If you do want to open a link in a new tab (to avoid having to reload the current one when you tap “Back” if you open a link in the traditional way), you’ll end up having to issue several taps (long tap-and-hold to bring up the link context menu; select Copy; tap the “Tabs” icon; either create a new tab or switch to an existing one; tap the address input field until you see Paste; tap “Paste” and, finally, tap Go).
- No download manager
- No ad filtering
- No favorite export/import
- Not possible to quickly scroll to the top of the page (nevertheless, if you use the recently-released QuickScroll – and you do jailbreak your phone –, this won’t be a problem. See THIS for a tutorial)
- No scriptlet support, which makes it impossible to quickly scroll to the top / bottom of the page without problems – or to run in-page searches
- No in-page text search
- In non-full screen, the upper bar takes more screen estate because it has another (title + orientation lock) row in it
- No form autofill with previously stored user data
- No gestures at all in full screen mode (while iCab supports previous / next page and tab)
- While it has a tablist, it doesn’t have thumbnails of the pages (not that big a problem, though)
- It stutters a bit on the (slower) iPhone 3G, unlike iCab. This stuttering, however, isn’t as bad as that of, say, the VanillaSurf browser. The 3G S being much faster, you won’t really be annoyed by the slightly still discernable, occasional stuttering. That is, on the 3G, iCab Mobile behaves, in this respect, much better.

All in all, I’d still stick with iCab Mobile. It’s just far more capable – except for the more sophisticated scrolling capabilities and the ability to use external compression gateways of Oceanus.

Screenshots:

The settings dialogs:


(the three major advantages of Oceanus over iCab Mobile: the two kinds of scrolling and the compression usage)

The following two Settings screens:





Landscape view in non-full screen mode (note the thick upper bar):



List of tabs:



In full screen mode, if you don’t enable Shake mode, there’re three icons in the lower left corner of the screen for Previous / Next / exit full screen. (Note that their transparency can be set in Settings):



The “+” menu:



and, finally, the link context menu:

 

UPDATE (08/17/2009):

A brand new, 1.7 version of iCab Mobile has just been released.



It introduces, among other things, configurable User-Agent strings. You can, currently, only switch in the global system Settings application, which means you’ll be forced to exit iCab Mobile entirely when you encounter a page needing another User-Agent. Note that if you have a jailbroken phone and use Backgrounder, you’ll also need to force iCab to completely exit in order for the new User-Agent to be used. (Plain page reloads won’t work.)

The new setting is at the bottom of the system-level iCab Mobile setting:



Upon tapping “Browser ID”, you’ll be presented the User-Agents you can select from:



All in all, the best Web browser has become even better - now, you won't need third-party browsers (up to now, Journey Web Browser or Spy) to visit Web sites not returning a page of your liking when you browse them with the factory default Safari.

 

UPDATE (8/25/2009): In THIS Apple.com thread, I’ve run into an interesting question: whether Safari stops refreshing Web pages when minimized (that is, when you press the Home button).

You already know that Safari is vastly different from third-party Web browsers in that it doesn’t exit when you press the Home button. Instead, it just minimizes itself. To quickly test whether it continues executing scripts / reloading pages when minimized, I’ve created a JSP page with the http-equiv="refresh" tag in it – and an additional System.out.println() call so that I can always see in the web server’s console whether there’s any page access. The source of the page is as follows (change [‘s and ]’s to <’s and >’s, respectively):

[meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1"]
[% System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis()); %]

I’ve found out the following: Safari does stop executing even http-equiv-based refreshes (the most common way of forcing a Web browser to continuously refresh pages, not counting in JavaScript-based tools) when you either minimize it (press the Home button) or suspend the entire phone (press the Power button). That is, you do NOT need to be afraid of it using up all your data plan allowance in some hours.

Not so with third-party Web browsers. When minimized (with Backgrounder, using the Home button) or when you press the Power button, they continue running. They also result in keeping Wi-Fi connected in when the device is (seemingly) sleeping, resulting in a big hit on the battery life.

I’ve tested the following browsers in this respect (using the latest versions of all of them):
iCab Mobile (unfortunately, it also keeps running scripts on a page in another, currently invisible tab. This is also true of Safari, though.)
BigBrowser+
VanillaSurf
Journey Web Browser

All in all:

1. Make absolutely sure you do keep this in mind when suspending your phone for more than a few minutes with a running third-party browsers. Not many pages use page refreshing; but if there is any page you keep currently open (in any tab), it’ll result in the Wi-Fi connection being kept open. If you do know a given page does this, kill it (either close its tab or load, say, Google instead) before suspending your iPhone.

2. Make sure you do close other, currently invisible tabs if you do know in one/some of them there’s a page continuously fetching new data / refreshing itself. You can easily see this based on the “clock” and the given page’s refreshes.

Note that tomorrow I also post some YouTube videos showing all these in practice. Not today as it’s pretty late in here and I need to upload some 200 Mbyte hi-res stuff to YouTube, which can’t be done quickly.

 

UPDATE (8/26/2009 18:16 CET): as promised, I've updated the videos showing the suspension behavior of Safari and iCab Mobile.

The first video shows Safari rendering the test page. Before starting it (at 05:00), you can clearly see there are no new numbers displayed in the “Tomcat” background window. After starting Safari, a new number is displayed a second. At 09:00, when I pressed Home, the numbers also stopped meaning there’s no background execution when Safari is minimized. When I restarted Safari at 0:14, I had to manually tap the “Refresh” icon to restart execution; before that, even with Safari already running in the foreground, there were no page refreshes (that is, resuming the browser doesn’t automatically restart pages with auto-refreshing code). At 0:19, I’ve minimized Safari again to check any kinds of page refreshes are suspended. At 0:22, I resumed Safari and, at 0:24, I’ve tapped the refresh icon to restart execution. Immediately after this (at 0:26), I’ve suspended the entire iPhone by pressing the Power button. As you can see, the flood of new numbers stopped, meaning suspended execution. At 0:30, I resumed the phone and at 0:32, by tapping the Refresh icon, I resumed the execution of the Web page; this is why it’s only then that the Tomcat window in the background started displaying new numbers. After this, I re-tested the execution suspension at 0:38 when minimizing Safari by pressing the Home button (and restarted execution at 0:43). At 0:45, I re-tested suspension by pressing the Power button (suspending the entire phone).

The second video shows Safari continuing to execute page refreshes when you open a new tab. Right at the beginning, I started executing the script; immediately after that, I’ve tapped the “Tabs” icon in the lower right corner and created a new tab by tapping “New tab” in the lower left corner. After this, I just waited still to see the execution to go on. (See the rolling numbers in the Tomcat window in the background Tomcat window.)

The third video shows iCab’s NOT suspending execution when minimized (with Backgrounder) / the entire phone is suspended. At 0:04, I suspended the phone; as you can see, the Tomcat window still shows activity. That is, iCab still continued executing the code (and also kept the Wi-Fi connection active, which is, otherwise, deactivated when suspending the iPhone.) After this, I resumed the phone and, at 0:14 (note the “Backgrounding enabled” status message), I’ve minimized it by long-pressing Home. The flood of the new status messages didn’t stop at this, unlike with Safari. Note that this video doesn’t have any demonstration of iCab’s behavior when executing the web page in a background tab (it does the same as Safari; that is, it keeps these pages executing.)

 

UPDATE (9/27/2009 22:16 CET):

The new version, 1.3, of Journey has just been released with the following changes:



That is, there have been several (welcome) changes; therefore, I’ve given it a very thorough ride to see whether it can be recommended more than iCab Mobile, the current king of iPhone Web browsers. In a word: no.

The biggest problem with this browser, the stuttering animation, which is pretty annoying even on the super-fast 3G S, is really a problem – particularly on earlier (and much slower) iPhone models. That is, while you may want to prefer giving it a try on the 3G S (if you absolutely hate iCab Mobile or you’re absolutely sure you do need the easiest way of iterating between tabs), if you “only” have an iPhone 2G or 3G, stay aay from it. The kinetic scrolling is really marred by the stuttering – even as of the current version. This, in my opinion, is really annoying – not only with Journey, but also with a lot of other Web browsers.

It also has some other, annoying problems and limitations. For example, if you tap a link in full screen mode, there isn’t any visible feedback on whether this has been successful and the page is indeed being loaded. In iCab Mobile, you see in these cases a clock in the upper left and a progress bar at the bottom. With Journey, there isn’t anything like this – you simply can’t know whether anything is loaded until it’s actually displayed (or switch back to non-fullscreen mode).

Some additional screenshots of the entire Settings (invokable by touching the screen with three fingers at the same time) showing, for example, the just-added User-Agent rewriting capabilities:





All in all - stay with iCab Mobile - it's capable of everything that Journey is - and a lot more.

 

If you just quit iCab when you want to suspend your phone for more than a few minutes, everythign will be fine and no processes will remain running in the background.

 

UPDATE (10/19/2009):

1. The most important piece of news is that, at last, the built-in Safari Web browser has received an add-on tool that makes it possible to completely disable loading images (to speed up loading or and/or lowering data use). This, so far, hasn’t been possible with the browser – all you could do was using third-party Web compression / script and image removal services like Skweezer. Or, of course, use an alternative Web browsers supporting disabling images; for example, iCab Mobile.

The tool, ImaSafari, is free and is only available via Cydia. This, unfortunately, means you will need to jailbreak your phone to get access to it. Please see THIS for links to some 3.1.2 jailbreaing tutorials.



To install it, in Cydia, enter “ImaSafari” to search for:



The main page of the utility (you’ll, of course, see “Install” instead of “Modify” in the upper right corner; you’ll need to tap it in order to install the app)



2. Mango Browser has also received some updates:



3. So did BOLT. Nevertheless, neither Mango Browser nor BOLT are worth even checking out. They certainly can’t hold a candle to iCab Mobile, currently the best .

4. Note that there is another Web browser out there, MyDesktop (iTunes link). After carefully evaluating it and discussing the matter with the developer, I’ve opted for not to review it yet. When a new version is released with new functionalities, I might publish a review.

 

UPDATE (10/24/2009): 1. Perfect Browser has been updated:




It seems a complete review & re-evaluation is in order.

2. I’ve also spent quite a lot of time with the $2 iNetDual, which was released after first publishing my roundup (this is why the roundup doesn’t discuss it) and found it pretty interesting. Particularly the scriptlet support is considerably better than in any else browser; for example, it has a built-in mini-editor for them. In addition, you can instruct scriptlets to do anything with the currently selected (no copying / pasting is necessary) word(s). This is way superior to how iCab (and other browsers) work. Furthermore, you can freely put the icons of your scriplets next to the address bar.

It also supports mass downloading of images in a given Web page (and even on pages directly linked from it). There’s also folder (here, they’re called ‘categories’) support in the app; one of these folders makes sure the links in the folder are automatically displayed in the upper bar. You can assign two categories to each bookmark.

However, it has major drawbacks too when compared to iCab Mobile; for example, the lack of any kind of download manager; lack of more than two tabs (nevertheless, at least here you can open a link in the other tab); lack of any kind of address auto-completion (there’s, however, a history section in the bookmarks) and even the lack of real full screen mode (you can only hide the address bar – by default, with a shake towards you – but not the lower one). That is, it does surely have some disadvantages, which still keep me from recommending it as the new iCab Mobile-killer. Nevertheless, the scripting capabilities / support is very nice; hope either iCab Mobile comes up with something similar or iNetDual receives the same goodies (multiple tabs, download manager, real full screen mode etc.) as iCab Mobile.

Some screenshots:


A sample page (that of Digital Chocolate)


After downloading all the images of the above page, this is how they look in in Pictures


It’s in this menu that you can instruct iNetDual download all the images of the current Web page (or all the Web pages linked to from it)

Image downloading/ saving in action; it can take quite a lot of time


Browse history (again, there’s no address bar auto-complete at all; that is, this is the only way to re-visit already visited pages)


Editing a bookmark; here, it’s a scriptlet. At the bottom, you can see the (individual) category setter lists; next to the bookmark URL, there’ s a right arrow taking you to the scriptlet editor shown in the next screenshot:

When adding / editing a bookmark and deciding where it should belong to, you don’t need to stick with the pre-defined category names, but can also define your own; here, it’s “myowncategory”:


A quick shot of the bookmark folders: as you can see, the new tag is indeed put in there:


The system-level Settings with fine-tunable, among other things, image downloading parameters:


It’s also here that you can fine-tune what shaking towards the X, Y and Z-axis should do:

This is the functionality you can assign to each of the three shaking directions:

 

UPDATE (10/25/2009 15:40 CET):

As I promised yesterday, I’ve pretty thoroughly scrutinized Perfect Browser (iTunes link HERE). It has indeed become a decent app; however, in my opinion, it still can’t really compete with iCab Mobile; nevertheless, it’s pretty close and is indeed worth checking out.

1. In-text search has been made much faster. Note that, however, it’s been entirely made by scriptlets (see my dedicated article HERE). Unfortunately, this also means it completely messes up HTML if it finds hits inside HTML markup tags (and not plain text). Two examples showing this:




Other iPhone browsers (including iCab Mobile) also having built-in text search don’t have this problem.

2. On-screen tabs have been added, which is great news for anyone liking them (personally, I don’t as they take up valuable screen estate, particularly in landscape orientation – and have never preferred browsers (e.g., NetFront on Symbian / Windows Mobile or the current early beta of Opera Mini 5) on other mobile platforms). You can also open a link (by tap-and-holding it) in a new tab.

I find the following problems with the multitab / multidocument approach of the browser:

- It’s pretty easy to close a tab inadvtartedly by tapping the cross in the upper right corner; this is particularly true with the last opened one when opening a new tab by hand (as the “New tab” tab is dangerously closely put to the “Close” cross of the last tab)

- There’s no “Open in a background tab” functionality. Sure, on-screen tabs make it possible to much more quickly switch back to the original page (even counting in the time needed to scroll the tabs if there’re too many of them); nevertheless, this approach is still more time-consuming than the one followed by, among other browsers, iCab Mobile.

- Adding insult to injury, you need to wait until the system-level link context menu comes up if you would like to prefer opening the new page in a new tab. In iCab Mobile, if you select “Ask” instead of the default settings under “Open Links to the same domain…” and “Open Links to other domains…”, you’re shown a context menu right after you tap a link – you don’t need to tap-and-hold the link and wait for the system menu to be displayed.

3. There’s a very nice, new mode called “Hyper Scroll” built-in. You can activate it under + / Activate Hyper Scroll:



It displays a large scrollbar next to the right edge of the screen; with that, you can quickly scroll up and down. This way, you can avoid having to jailbreak your phone to install QuickScroll (2) and/or use scriptlets to quickly scroll, say, to the bottom of the page. (Quick scrolling to the top of the page is supported in non-fullscreen mode.)

Currently, to my knowledge, no other browsers support this kind of built-in quick scroll. The current beta version of iCab Mobile does have the “Touchpad” functionality (a three-fingered tap brings up a large, virtual, transparent “touchpad”, where you can quickly set your position, also seeing where you currently are); however, the currently officially available one (1.7) still lacks this.


The “Touchpad” quick positioning / scrolling feature of the new iCab Mobile

4. There are some other niceties supported by the new version; for example, built-in support for site compression and all the goodies that this also means (for example, drastically reduced data use. Note that there’s no way to just disable loading images, unlike in iCab Mobile and, with the Cydia- based ImaSafari under Safari, though). An example:


(the built-in Settings; enable the uppermost switch to enable compression)

(the same in the current beta of iCab Mobile - note that it's NOT present in the currently available AppStore version!)

(before, also showing the Hyper Scroll vertical scrollbar)

(after)

This is still missing from the currently available, official iCab Mobile version (1.7) – while it has long been implemented (after my explicitly asking for it) in the beta version (1.8.9) under development, using Google Mobilizer (see screenshot above).

5. It also supports scriptlets. Note that it will always display the return value of scriptlets (and this can’t be suppressed); this can be a bit annoying as you need to issue another tap after executing the script:



Some of the important functionalities missing (excellently implemented in iCab):
- Complete lack of auto-complete
- Download manager
- Export / import favorites
etc.

Verdict

With all the new functionality, this browser has become a decent alternative to iCab Mobile. If you don’t miss the missing functionality, you may really want to give it a try. I, myself, stick with iCab as I still find it better (particularly because I also have the current beta version, which is substantially better than the currently available AppStore version, 1.7); nevertheless, you may want to give it a try – you won’t lose much ($1) if you find it insufficient.

 

UPDATE (10/28/2009): Frontpage at iPhoneMVP.com

Let me show you the picture accompanying the iPhone MVP article:

No comments are needed ;-)

 

UPDATE (11/05/2009 14:00 CET): New, 2.0 version of best Web browser iCab Mobile has finally been released!!

In my quick review of Perfect Browser (please see the previous update above) I’ve already introduced most of the new, excellent features of the forthcoming iCab Mobile version. The new version has just been released:




Please see the iCab Mobile screenshots (again, in the previous update) showing all these. The only remarkable shot I haven’t shown you in the previous review is that of the system-level Settings, where, among other things, you can enable the much thinner upper/lower command bars. It’s disabled by default; you will most probably want to enable it to free up a great deal of screen estate - unless you cannot tap the icons when this option enabled. (See the last-but-one, that is, “Small Toolbar”.)

 

nope - they're all AppStore apps.

 

now that iCab Mobile 2.0 is out, iCab Mobile.