Ice, Silk, Chrome: Three Alternative Android Web Browsers

Your Android smartphone or tablet probably came with a basic web browser, which couldn’t get to the bookmarks on your PC or Mac and lacked plugins and basic features. Mozilla quickly brought its Firefox browser to Android, but it was slow and unstable at first, and took awhile to catch up to what people were used to on bigger screens. This left the door wide open for alternative browsers like Dolphin — three different versions of it, in fact.

In the last year or so, however, a couple of new contenders have emerged. And now Opera, a well-known name in the web browser world, is bringing something completely different to smartphones and tablets.

Opera Ice

No, it’s not a musical about penguins. It’s a new browser from Opera, the company behind the popular Opera Mini web browser on gadgets like the Nintendo DS. And in a video demo of Opera Ice running on an iPad (it’ll run on Android too), an Opera rep demoed new features like simultaneous search, where you type in something to look up and get a Cover Flow kind of view showing Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and other search results for that thing. Just swipe through and tap on the one that you want, while they’re loading.

You’ll do a lot of swiping and tapping on Ice when it comes out in February, because it did away with nearly all of the buttons and menus and replaced them with simple gestures. This leaves it fresh and clear of clutter, although it may prove inconvenient if you forget the gesture you want. It also uses Opera’s Speed Dial, which makes browsing to your favorite websites as easy as tapping icons on your home screen is (Ice has its own sort-of-home-screen).

Amazon Silk

Amazon’s Silk web browser is bundled with its Kindle Fire tablets, and has been since they came out in late 2011. Unlike Ice, you won’t be able to install it on your own smartphone or tablet, although you can replace it with Dolphin or another alternative if you want to.

What makes Silk silky? Amazon claims that it’s “cloud-accelerated,” because Amazon’s servers remember and predict the sites you’re most likely to visit. They also do some of the heavy lifting for rendering web pages, as every site you visit goes through them. Why would you want to use anything else on a Kindle Fire? Because Amazon’s tracking the websites you visit, and some people find that creepy.

Google Chrome

The ultra-popular open-source web browser came to Android last year. And while it only works on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or above, it does sync bookmarks and tabs with your desktop and other gadgets. If you bought a Nexus device, like Google’s ultra-cheap Nexus 7 tablet which is designed to compete with the Kindle Fire, this is the browser it came with.

Chrome takes the opposite approach from Ice, and looks more like a desktop web browser, complete with tabs that you can reorder. It also has an incognito browsing mode which doesn’t keep track of your history, and is useful for when you want to keep certain things private. It doesn’t have apps or extensions yet, however, the way Chrome on the desktop (and Firefox on Android) does.