[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Safari

The built-in Web browser in the iPhone is still the most recommended one unless you have some special needs, which I’ll explain later. For example, unless you’re absolutely fed up with

-	the always-visible top and bottom bars taking up some (but not much, contrary to what some developers state) screen estate or the

-	inability to easily open and load pages in the background or the

-	limited number of pages you can store in-memory (as opposed to some other and, in this respect, better browsers) or the

-	inability to just download files (of types handled by the iPhone) into the file system – it will only pass the online files to the respective handler application in streaming mode, which, in most cases, won’t allow for saving.

These aren’t the only problems with Safari – when going over the feature chart, I’ll explain more of its shortcomings.

Nevertheless, if you can live with the problems of the browser, I recommend it the most as there simply isn’t a worthy contender to it. It’s only very rarely that you will want to switch to an alternative browser to, for example, quickly download some files into the file system of your iPhone so that they can later be read / played back / sent to another computer / Internet-enabled phone without having to download them again or you really need to keep as many tabs open as possible.

Note that there’re a number of welcome fixes and additions in iPhone OS 3.0. First, it’s definitely better when it comes to handling memory (but in no way as good as some of the alternative browsers). It also allows for opening links in a new tab (if you don’t just quickly tap a link, but tap-and-hold for about 1 second) – something that has been sorely missing from earlier versions. Nevertheless, it still lacks some essential features like full screen mode or background page loading.

Now, let’s take a look at the alternative browsers produced by independent developers. Again, note that I only provide a quick evaluation / introduction here; it’s in the feature chart that I elaborate on all the features, advantages and disadvantages of each browser and compare them to the alternatives.

iCab Mobile 1.5

Feature-wise, it’d probably be the best browser of the bunch if it was more stable. Too bad it frequently crashed on both my testing environments (iPhone 3G with 2.1.1 jailbroken and 3.0 non-jailbroken), which makes it pretty much useless because of the constant restarts.

It allows for tweaking a lot of its parameters as can also be seen in the following two screenshots, taken from the first and the second half of the Settings dialog:

A screenshot of the Bookmarks dialog. As you can see, it’s also one of the very few browsers to support folders:

It’s also one of the very few browsers to allow for opening a page in a background page:

Air Browser 1.1

While this browser has some unique goodies (quick scroll up and, particularly, down to top/bottom-most; find in page), the exceptionally bad memory handling and the lack of real full screen makes it far less desirable than OS3’s Safari or some other 3rd party browsers. A screenshot also showing the only menu it has:

Also note that the menu has "Find in page" – too bad most other browsers (except for Safari, which allows for running scriptlets implementing this) lack this essential feature.

It’s one of the very few multitabbed browsers to have a list of the tab immensely helping finding the one you want (instead of swiping through pages until you find the one you want, sometimes with multiple swipes, as is in Safari):

Also note the two arrows at the bottom middle – they allow for quickly moving to the previous / next page.