I came across this browser by a fluke chance when I was checking out articles at PC World, and from what I remember from the article this is a very big name browser in Japan and they wanted to expand it to the international market. What really caught my eye is that they want to get 5% of the international market in the browser wars in the next couple of years. To give a background story to this browser, it was developed in 2005 in both English and Japanese and after 3 years it gain some popularity in the international community and so now they are trying to enter themselves into the browser wars.

So I went to the website, installed the browser and begin to check it out, well I see they took a page out of internet explorer, to an extent, and that is being able to change the render engine and right now they have some problems with gecko engine running properly or at least for me I am having problems displaying it correctly. Anyways basically what they did was combine firefox and internet explorer together in terms of features, look, security and some other typical browser stuff. The default engine of course is internet explorer, but I can get past that if you can.

It supports plug-ins which there are few of and some skins as well, which there are few of. However, y major concern is security since they are using a mixture of two of the biggest browsers I am curious to know what kind of security holes they opened up since it seems that they patched this browser together. Sad to say though with all these features and tons of customization, I can't really spend the time setting up this browser the way I want and the fact that firefox and internet explorer are years ahead of them. I suggest that they build their own engine and not make it gekko or IE based, something original. Also I think they should go over there features and combine them or remove some of them as there are far to many and that doesn't work for me.

PC World Article

Sleipnir Browser

 

 

 

Reply

The browser does look disappointingly similar to IE6:



Which is almost enough to put me off using it. Coupled with the fact there are few plugins, I think I'll forgo downloading a copy. The sole reason why I'm currently using Firefox at the moment is the vast range of plugins on offer.

Another thing I noticed was that the language has suffered a bit in translation. Although this is more of an annoyance than anything serious, I'm quite petty about poor English and having to face it almost every day when I'm using the Internet would probably drive me mad



QFT. It will be interesting to see if they do catch up but I doubt I'll ever hear from them again. If this is Japan's most popular browser, it's quite interesting to think that the West is quite far ahead of a country you associate with being very technologically advanced.

 

 

 

Reply

I have to say, and agree with electric ink, that it already looks TOO much like Internet Explorer, to include icons and all. I wonder why they're trying to achieve what has already been done. The only thing that it features that stands out is the whole ability to swap between Gecko and Trident rendering engines, but I'm sure that someone's going to develop yet another add-on for FireFox that will do the same thing. What then?

Then again, I'm biased towards FireFox and have no incentive to switch over to another browser...

Reply

Hate it. It looks like a crappy copy of the first IE thats been modified a little in vb2008 ;l. There not even using there own pictures.

Reply