I just started toying around with Mach5 Web Browser from NetAcceler and it has a few really fancy tricks. To begin with, it’s very fast. The website doesn’t have a lot of details but I believe that it is a proxy based web browser so the rendering is done on the server and not the phone (think of SkyFire or Opera Turbo). The browser supports full Flash 10 (not mobile Flash, but the real deal Flash), Ajax, Java, ActiveX and more. Youtube is no problem here. Even playing embedded video like CNN’s video is no problem and a popup asks you if you want play the movie and if so it opens in a standalone player which plays very smoothly and doesn’t require any resizing. You can also choose whether you want to view webpages in mobile view or in PC mode. Zooming is accomplished by double tapping on the screen (and you can adjust the amount it zooms in the settings) or you can bring up a toolbar to zoom in/out as much as desired. It does not automatically resize the text to fit the screen but you can go into the menu and select text to open in a new window that is just full screen black and white text that you can easily scroll through and even save the text to a file. You can also open images in a new window and save them. There’s an option to block popups, multiple pages can be toggled by a simple flickable overview screen and there’s an onscreen mouse to help get more precise clicks.
So what’s the downside? Well the browser is a beta that expires sometime in ‘mid May’ and it’s unclear what will happen then. Also, based on the fact that it is a proxy based browser expect data and battery usage to be high and, if you lose your internet connection you won’t be able to continue to view the webpage. Hit the jump for a few screenshots so you can see it in action.
Details can be found on NetAccler’s webpage or you can check out this thread on XDA started by prking07. If you’re on the market for a browser this is worth a preview.
