Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 3: NetFront Life

Published on 2 Jun 2011 at 1:38 pm.
Filed under Mobile.

This is the third in a series of posts on interesting third party browsers for the mobile Web. Read part 1: Opera Mini, and part 2: Opera Mobile.

Moving away from Opera we now begin to look at some of the other active mobile browsers on the market. The NetFront Life browser from ACCESS Co. is an interesting little browser on the Android market. This browser represents 2.87% of the worldwide mobile market with 1.36% of the north american market share, so it’s worth at least checking out. Unlike Opera, this browser uses your phone’s HTML rendering engine so rendering wise it is the same as the stock browser on the device. This is useful knowledge for testing support, and means that its features are what make it stand out from the stock browser on your system. And standout it does with an impressive feature set worth checking out.

NetFront Life host a number of cool features. Features such as the unified navigation (sort of like Opera Speed dial) and visual page loading are pretty interesting (in fact, I’d be surprised if the visual page loading isn’t picked up by other browsers), and web clipping/scrapbooking with Everynote integration might be useful for you if you’re in to that type of thing. But the killer feature about this browser is the tilt mode.

NetFront Life’s tilt mode

Any mobile browser worth their salt supports an alternate view of displaying a Web page in both portrait and landscape mode. NetFront Life goes the extra mile and introduced a third, tilt mode. This tilt mode kicks in while you’re rotating the phone from one mode to another and places the site on a diagonal. This is useful if you’re in an odd position and can’t quite get it one way or the other. It does take some getting used to, and admittedly some layouts don’t do too well in this mode, but it is a very noticeable feature that makes the NetFront Life browser standout among its peers.

This post was originally published as Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 3: NetFront Life for The BrandBuilder Company.