Mountain View California based search engine giant, Google, is now gradually catching up in the Smartphone market with the likes of Apple and Blackberry. Google’s Open source mobile OS Android is an operating system for Smartphones, and within just a year or so of its inception, it has come at par with the likes of Apple’s iOS powered iPhone and the Smartphone industry giant Blackberry. Android market share is steadily increasing with its app market gradually dominating the Smartphone’s app market. The reason behind this is the open source feature of Android that allows developers and users alike to create and use applications efficiently.
Regular mobile browsing is indeed being taken over by Smartphone experience in general and with every rendition of Android version, mobile browsing is becoming more enhanced. There are many developers out there who are desperately trying to launch their mobile browsers to make their mark in the market, so some of the alternatives for Mobile browsing on the Android powered devices other than the stock browsers are as follows:
Multimedia Rich Browser
Browser developer for the Android platform, Dolphin has been offering a pretty awesome browser for quite some time now and it keeps on adding more browsing apps to its cache. The latest addition is a new and revamped HD Browser that is very much ideal for watching videos and multimedia contents on the internet. The free application browser also has some latest features including, a management regarding the webpage in the address bar and the bookmarks support for the folder.
Another web browser giant Opera, has also been actively developing browsers for the Android platform. The Opera’s mini mobile browser is basically designed for consumption at media front, with an added advantage of integrated data compression that will enable the loading of WebPages very effectively. The best part is that the Opera Mini Browser is totally free and it works on all kind of Android devices.
One more media centric browser for Android is SkyFire. It houses flash support and also the recommendations for a similar kind of contents. The latest free Android web browser comes with a series of multiple view options and it runs pretty seamlessly on the latest Froyo 2.2. With the sharing option enabled in the web browser, SkyFire also makes it pretty simple for sharing various kinds of contents on the web.
Functions and UI
On the user interface and functions front, developers have developed quite fully featured browsers that are way better than the stock versions available with the phone. Mozilla, the second best browser in terms of market share is also going to release a beta app with a full Android release in the upcoming versions. Almost the same as its desktop counterpart, the Firefox 4 Beta offers a full customized browsing experience that is highly optimized and curtailed for the cross-device experience. Moreover, it is the first mobile browser that is having add-ons, a very personalized sort of start page and a huge cache of personal features to make mobile browsing on the Android powered devices to be an amazing experience.
Another name in this category is the Xscope Android browser that is aimed at enhancing navigation on the mobile device especially the Navigation on the web UI. There are a number of options for Zooming, swiping through the web contents and double tapping. It’s got a very user friendly text search, sharing and bookmarking, integrated screen captures and the copy paste options for the URLs and the text. Moreover, it also has easy downloading options and setting up options for the various tasks and settings. Xscope’s FULL version costs about $2.99 and the LITE version cost about $0.99.