[General Topics] Menneisyys:
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.