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Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android

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Looking for an alternative to your current mobile browser? More people are accessing the web on their mobile devices than ever before. The race to build a reliable and user friendly mobile web browser has started.
When it comes to Flash and other web complexities, finding a one-size-fits-all browsing experience is hard to come by.
Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft have tried to bring their version of a desktop browser to mobile phones with good results, while other companies are developing browsers only for mobile devices.
But there are better alternatives. Here are 4 of the best alternatives to your current web browser:

Skyfire

Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android
Skyfire has become a popular mobile browser for users looking to view Flash content with pesky flash error messages. Skyfire enables users to play flash videos and games that play poorly on other mobile browsers.
Social Features
With Skyfire users have quick and easy access to Facebook and Twitter feeds, profiles, friends, inbox items, events and places.
Android
iPhone
iPad
Features:
  • Transcode Flash content into HTML for fast viewing of Flash videos.
  • Desktop or Mobile option with User Agent Switching.
  • Facebook QuickView
  • Fireplace Feed Reader
  • Popular Pages
  • Facebook Like Button on every page
  • Skyfire Search and Related Ideas
  • Twitter QuickView
  • Social Sharing
  • Private Browsing
Phone and OS Support: Android, iPhone and iPad.

Opera Mini

Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android
According to W3C’s Web Statistics and Trends, Opera holds a growing 2.5% active user base compared to the other desktop browsers like Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari.
Opera’s mobile version Mobile Mini has quickly become one of the worlds most popular mobile browsers consisting of more than 30 million users.
Opera mini displays full size web pages just like on desktop browsers and is standards-compliant. opera has introduced new animations to allow users to quickly snap through web sites.
Opera mini uses server side compression which allows Opera to load web pages much more quickly than other mobile phone browsers.
Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android
Additional Features:
  • Multitask with Tabs
  • Touchscreen and key-pad style ready
  • Speed Dial for Favorite Web Sites
  • URl Auto Completion=less typing
  • Compresses web pages to reduce data charges
Opera has listed a complete spec sheet. Check out the technical specifications here.
Opera Mini or Opera Mobile?
Opera offers both a mini and full mobile browser. Not sure which to choose? Opera states “In your mobile phone browser, just navigate to m.opera.com and Opera will automatically detect the best version for your device. Otherwise, use the information provided here and manually select a version of Opera Mini or Opera Mobile.”
Phone and OS Support: Android, Windows Mobile, Java Phones, Blackberry, iPhone, and S60.

Firefox Mobile

Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android
Mozilla is in the process of going mobile. Currently Firefox Mobile is in beta and only available for Android Phones.
With Firefox Sync, users can sync history, bookmarks, tabs, passwords, and form data between desktop and mobile.
Create personalized start pages that brings you back to the tab you left of when you last used Firefox.
Touch Friendly UI makes use of the full swipe features on Android. Bookmark sites with a single tab view tabs as thumbnails.
From Mozilla’s Beta page “With the inclusion of two major technologies called “Electrolysis” and “Layers” the UI is much more responsive and graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming and animations have been greatly improved.”
Additional features:
  • Context Menus
  • Tabbed Browsing
  • Site Menu
  • Tap Zooming
  • Location-Aware Browsing
  • Password Manager
  • Speed and Responsiveness
Phone and OS Support: Android Only
“Apple iPhone: Try Firefox Home, the free Web companion to Firefox. (link to question below about Firefox Home) We currently do not have plans to build an iPhone browser due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution.”

Access  NetFront Life Browser

Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android

You may not have heard of this browser before but according to Access “…NetFront products, including NetFront Browser as an embedded Internet browser, have shipped in over 950 million devices (as of the end of June 2010) around the world…“
NetFront v4.1 runs on JavaScript and claims to be twenty times faster than previous versions v3.5 of the browser.
Top 4 Mobile Web Browser Alternatives for iPhone and Android
NetFront has a lot of the features you would expect from a browser including history, cookies, tabs/tables, CSS and JS Settings, and a dynamic rendering engine for HTML.
NetFront supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 Basic and 1.1, cHTML, WML 1.3, CSS 1 & 2, JavaScript 1.5, dynamic HTML and some DOM, SSL2.0/3.0, TLS1.0, Cookies, and GIF, JPEG, PNG, MNG image formats. ActiveX and Flash plugins are supported.
More features:
  • Visual Bookmarks
  • PagePilot
  • Animated Zoom Features
  • Stick and Swift Navigation
  • Fast Rendering Mode and Content Display Speeds
  • Visual Page Loading
  • Tilt Mode
  • Scrapbook
  • Filtered Search
Phone and OS Support: Android

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