Apple’s mobile Safari is a great browser. It offers great standards compliance and speed, but it isn’t everything for everyone. It can’t print money or leap tall buildings in a single bound, so there will be people that want a different mobile browsing experience. Luckily, there are options out there for the iOS, so I decided to highlight some of the most popular right here:
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Opera Mini
This app had a fair bit of controversy around it before Apple approved it. Because it doesn’t use the WebKit rendering engine that is built into iOS, it does all of the rending on Opera’s servers, and then sends the compressed results to your device. It works well enough, but the user interface isn’t quite as slick as Safari. I’d only recommend using this if you’re worried about conserving bandwidth. You can get this app for free.
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iCab Mobile
iCab Mobile is much more of a normal situation. This browser doesn’t use any server-side tomfoolery. Like nearly all of the alternate browsers for iOS, it takes what Safari does, and adds some features. If full screen browsing, a built-in download manager, and a guest mode interest you, you should take the time to try out iCab. You can buy this app for $1.99 USD.
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Atomic
Atomic is another WebKit-based browser for iOS. It features customizable search, offline viewing, font size management, a customizable user agent string, and Twitter and Facebook link sharing built in. Atomic is perhaps the most feature rich Safari alternative, and you can buy it for only $0.99 USD.
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Mercury
This WebKit-based Safari alternative sports some pretty great features. It has ad-blocking, private browsing, and offline viewing. Mercury is a very close competitor to Atomic. You can buy this app for $0.99 USD.
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