14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet Explorer - Engined Browsers Competition article didn't cool down yet, but I think that an individual review of another program from that family won't harm anyone. Just below the line that granted admission into my last compared review were a bunch of excellent programs, and one of them is right here, right now, waiting for its own review.
The subject is called Crazy Browser, also known as AM Browser recently, and last winter it reached second Beta of its third version. Being an IE-front end, this program's installation kit is very small, having 0.7MB in size. The setup process can be completed by anyone, so there's nothing special about that step...next stop, Crazy Browser's interface and features!
What we have here is a tabbed browser with a highly customizable interface. It would have been nice to have skin support available, but it's not here, so the way it looks depends on your chosen Windows theme. The main elements of the interface that can be removed or kept in sight as you want are seven in number, starting with the six toolbar items and ending with the status bar. Let's find out more about these toolbars now...
The Standard Buttons toolbar contains mostly items that you can find inside Internet Explorer, like Go Back/Forward, Favorites, History and others. The extra functions available here allow you to open new tabs, edit current page or add external tools.
The Plug-ins bar comes with only two built in tools that allow you to kill Flash files from the current tab or from all opened pages, while the Logo Panel helps you close tabs easier.
The rest of the toolbars don't bring anything special, but they can prove quite useful, since nobody can live well without having an Address Bar inside its browser, and having your links and search tool one click away comes very handy.
These are the tools that everyone can see, but usually power stays in the shadows, and they are the real force of a program, especially a Web browser.
Crazy Browser has a smart popup blocker and an AD blocker that do their jobs pretty well. In order to change their settings and much more, you have to choose the Advanced Options item from the Options menu. Once you are there, you get the idea about what's behind Crazy Browser, since I am aware that the interface won't seem exciting at all to many people.
Before I draw the line, I have to name some of the great features that can be noticed inside the options area that I talked about above. You can use mouse gestures, domain completion, erase history items when the program is closed and more, and I am sure that it's going to be a pleasure for you to discover them all.
These being said, let's draw the conclusions and heat up the network interfaces with Crazy Browser!
The Good
Crazy Browser is a fast, reliable and highly customizable browser. It uses a decent amount of your system's resources and has a lot of features that you won't find in Internet Explorer and stands side by side with other IE-based browsers.
The Bad
I think that one of the main drawbacks of this program is its interface that misses skin support and also looks like IE maybe too much. Same problem as usual, the support and Help content available are yet to be seen, and I would love to find out how to use the Translation feature, if it really works...
The Truth
I've been using this program for a time and I won't stop now. For FireFox and Opera users, a light and fast browser like this could be the perfect way to view pages that have problems displaying in their favorite application. If you hate any other browser than IE or just don't want to try anything else, get this, you'll feel like home but also you'll get a lot of power under almost the same hood as before.
The path has been shown, now the choice is yours. Take your time, the reward will be yours for free, you only need a little patience.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
