Comments on: What’s the best Android web browser?

By: Dr Paramjeet Singh

Dr Paramjeet Singh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:26:42 +0000

I have SAMSUNG GALAXY s i9000 Android 2.1 ,upgradable to 2.2… Still I am using 2.i original version. Internet explorer given bu Samsung working well.. .
I want to try some other web explorer. But these are not giving PINH Zoom. Opera 10 beta does not get downloaded in it, as it will work in 2.2 galaxy.
Still not tried DOLPHIN .. I will try that. Let us see if it will give pinch zoom in 2.1 or not?

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:19:53 +0000

Thanks for the reviews! This is a great starting point for those of us who haven’t had a chance to play with any of the available browsers out there in the Market. Keep up the good work!

By: jesse

jesse — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:04:08 +0000

I used steel for probably a year, but with this last update I installed, it startes crashing all the time, and with each crash, it would then say that my battery was dead and not work until I plugged the phone in. Since I deleted Steel, things have been fine. It is sad, though, because it has a nice interface and I think the ‘stock’ browser is pretty terrible. Hence the reason I am reading these reviews (thanks!)

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:40:59 +0000

You can actually change Steel so that it doesn’t open a blank page. I’ve switched over to xScope, so I don’t remember all the details, but I think there’s an option in settings to load either the home page (which you have to set in your bookmarks by adding the home tag to one bookmark) or the pages you had open from last session.

By: Jem

Jem — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:44:53 +0000

I settled on Steel after many weeks of road testing most of the free browser apps on the market (I have a G1 and after the Cupcake instal the default browser became unbarably slow). The only issue I have with Steel is the blank screen on open – I have never had it crash at all.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:21:20 +0000

Right now I’m playing around with xScope.

Earlier I had tried to use it and gave up because it looked too difficult to learn.

After carefully reading the documentation, I’m warming up to it and will probably post a full review of it in a later blog post. It is not intuitive at all (yes, you do need to read the FAQ), but once you get to the xScope way of doing things, a lot of it makes sense.

By: voidcast

voidcast — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:17:50 +0000

I liked steel browser except for the fact that it caused my android browser to stop working when I installed it. Android browser kept force closing for as long as steel was installed. Only way to fix it was to uninstall steel.

However, my favourite browser at the moment is dolphin. I like it mainly because of the large number of features. Plus it has tabbed browsing.

By: ubuntucat

ubuntucat — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:38:19 +0000

Well, I know some of the browsers I mentioned allow you to change the user agent (Steel is one of them). Try changing the user agent to iPhone and then see if the website still gives you problems.

By: Gustav Dahl / Wikzo

Gustav Dahl / Wikzo — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:29:11 +0000

Great read. It seems there are no such thing as a perfect browser for Android (yet). I have tried almost all of those you mention, but none of them work quite like what I want them to.

For example my school has a website showing our school timetables. When I try to visit it via my HTC Hero, the site tells me that I am using a wrong resolution. This makes it impossible for me to navigate to the right hand corner where the log in button is. And I can’t zoom out to see the whole website.

When I first installed Steel some months ago, the website worked, because I made the browser act like a normal PC browser. Now, however, that option doesn’t quite work with my school’s website.

A friend of mine got an iPhone and the website runs perfectly well on it.

Now I am just waiting for Mozilla to release Firefox for Android. It looks very nice and I like their tab layout.