HTML5 ARTICLE

June 25, 2013

Dolphin for Android Upgraded, New Interface for Trade Shows


Mobotap, a company that makes the Android (NewsAlert) Web browser Dolphin, came out on June 23, 2013, with version 10 of its system, bringing with it many advances. The first is that Dolphin redesigned its interface to make it more navigable, which makes it look pretty similar to Google (News Alert) Chrome. This is intentional, as Dolphin’s shtick is that it is one of the best mobile alternatives for Chrome.

How this browser differs from the standard browser on Android phones and devices is that it offers more HTML5-based services, which allows it to be more customizable, run faster and have more doodads and gizmos on it, such as tabbed browsing, Sonar and gesture searching.

Dolphin Sonar is what the company calls the voice search function on its devices, which goes through websites much like any other search engine, but you can do it all without typing a word. If someone says into it, “Spiderman poster, eBay (News Alert),” the phone will go through all of eBay to figure out what they would like.

Gesture searching is another included function, with which a person can just swipe a letter onto the screen if the function is enabled. A scribbled “T” can take you to Twitter or Tumblr, and an F will take you to Facebook (NewsAlert), depending on your settings. If the user does not want to use these functions, Mobotap’s Dolphin has an Adobe Flash Component with which the user can go back to the “old Web” if they so desire.

While this is a major update for the company, and Dolphin’s ease of use and performance have garnered rave reviews, this has not always been the case. In 2011, Dolphin was embroiled in a privacy scandal where all the URLs that were searched on the browser were being stored as plain text in a remote server. While it has improved on that front, the fact that the company had inert URLs is small potatoes compared to the recent NSA scandal. Despite all of that, the fact that Dolphin has 80 million people in its user base shows that this browser works, and this is just an improvement.




Edited by Alisen Downey





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