Iris Browser 1.1.8 Released

Seems like there is huge mobile browser frenzy going on these days. We recently had Skyfire 1.0 released  officially taking that browser out of beta and then we have a Opera 9.7 (Turbo) to be released tomorrow and now we have Iris 1.1.8 which was released today. I use Iris as my primary browser because it is a lot faster to start up than any of the other browsers and the websites that I visit on my phone are pretty simple (Email, mobility sites, ESPN) and are fast to load since I just use mobile version of the sites. Here are some of the improvements in the browser as a listed by Torch Mobile here.

• Improved graphics performance
• Faster networking and loading of local files
• Improved memory usage
• Improved asynchronous behavior while loading pages
• Support for the W3C Geolocation API
• Support for HTML5 SQL databases and client side storage
• Rendering improvements, including for <canvas>
• CSS transformations and effects
• Improved Thai support
• Right-to-left language fixes
• Many general bug fixes

Download it here. I have been playing with the browser for a while and here is what I have seen so far:

• Slightly faster although not a huge improvement, you can still notice a slight increase in load times.
• Better zooming and better use of the capacitive zoom.

Other than those two things I did notice anything else in the performance or aesthetics of the browser. Maybe I am just missing some things and did not play with the browser enough. If you use Iris and notice any new changes that I did not notice let us know.