I've been a long time adopter of the Opera web browser on mobile phones (on my old Nokia and my Blackberry), so ever since I moved to Android around a year ago, I installed
Opera mini and used it exclusively.
Trouble in paradise
Recently, I wasn't as pleased with my choice:
NB: I have a Samsung Galaxy II
- The app kept crashing. Too much. I follow a lot of news sites and forums, I often open several tabs to mark the pages I need to read. I can't begin to tell you how annoying it is for me when the browser crashes and I lose all my tabs.
- It was supposed to
deliver popular pages from a cache on their servers (or something like that) compress data on their servers, and that made it faster <edit>(and cheaper, a feature that is not very useful to me anymore, now that I have quasi-unlimited browsing)</edit>. It was the main thing: Speed. I moved to Opera early on because of speed. Lately I don't feel it's faster than the rest, I wonder if they still (can) do that.
- It felt bulky in comparison with other browsers. Heavy menus, with a lot of buttons I never use, often consuming large parts of the screen real-estate. For instance I never used Bookmarks on Opera. I love them at home or at the office, but Opera never compelled me to actually use them.
There are probably other factors as well, but it was mainly the constant crashes that bugged me the most. I moved for a bit to the native browser and didn't like it. It's a minimal browser, but the bad kind of minimal. It doesn't offer any special features, but does the job and does it well. But browsing was not comfortable.
UC Browser
For the past week, I've moved to
UC Browser, based on the suggestion of the Google Play store. I am extremely pleased. It does all the basic jobs extremely well, and here are a couple of features it nails perfectly:
Did I mention it's made by a Chinese company?
- Touch motion: I can zoom in and out by double tapping or swiping, switch tabs by horizontal sliding, opening and closing tabs by sliding in all directions with 2 fingers. That's what they have so far, but it's already a game changer. Clicking on a button on a phone is a pain, because everything's so damn small. It takes me 3 taps on Opera to shift tabs vs 1 slide for UCB. I browse a lot when in the bus/metro or when walking, sliding feels a lot more comfortable.
- Auto-wrap: This is genius. No matter how much I zoom in, the text areas will resize properly taking the correct width, both in landscape mode and portrait. I enjoy excessive zoom ins, because I like my font wide and clear. Now on UCB, I can enlarge the font as much as I want without having to scroll horizontally until the end of the line. (You do still scroll for fixed-width objects, like pictures, but most of what I do is read text anyway). Oh, did I mention the resize is almost instantaneous?
Generally speaking, the browser feels robust and fast, while still acting fast, has many features (like Night mode, that allows dimming the lights when the brightness is too high) but it doesn't shove them down your throat. It definitely makes browsing a comfortable experience.
Cons
Although very minor, I feel I should share what bother me in this browser:
- There are links I cannot remove from the "Favorite Sites" grid. I love the FS, because this is where I begin my browsing almost 99% of the time. Now on UCB, I constantly have in my face some sponsored links, the latest scores of some Cricket league and a major link to their own private Android App Store. I really wish I could get rid of all this clutter.
- I don't know anyone who uses this browser. Literally no one. Every time it asks me to input a password, I feel weirdly suspicious...
In this topic, we can present the browser we use, and describe how it fits with our browsing habits.
PS: I am not doing statistics to see who uses what, but I'm more interested in discussion about browsers and the web. Please avoid one-line posts like "I use Chrome".