14 DAY TRIAL // It's been a little over two months since the last security update for IE 7. Unlike Mozilla Firefox, IE 7 proved to be steady as a rock when it came to facing all sorts of vulnerabilities. Version 6 of the Microsoft web browser had many followers and many other products of the same category based their engine on Microsoft's ingenuity.
It is time for version 7 to be in the line of fire and get improved by developers by creating new web browsers based on IE7. The first one that borrowed the multi-threaded frame technology (avoids the web page to become unresponsive) is from the Richmond giant.
Copying the same tabbed system used in Internet Explorer 7 and basing the entire ?constitution? on Microsoft's success, Phoenix Studio succeeded into creating a stable, well equipped web browser that could actually make IE7 have the same fate as the earlier version.
TheWorld Browser looks like IE7, moves like IE7, uses almost the same amount of resources as IE7 but has additional options that any other browser will envy. The application is in RC1 stage so there is still work to be done. The chameleon looks allow TheWorld to turn its face into Opera 8, Safari, or Flock, to mention just a few of the skins you can download and install. The thing with installing plugins and skins is that they are automatically embedded in the interface and the user has only to push a button.
Similar to IE7, the menu bar is out of its ordinary place, but not ensconced behind the ALT key. The menu bar is located in the top right hand corner of the application window. The relaxing MAC-like looks of the default skin seem to be enough for the average user, but in the menus available there are some features every user would like to have in the default browser.
The first one is placed under the Edit menu and consists in editing the web page in the active tab. Don't fret, nothing will happen if you decide to play a prank on one of your friends and place his/her name in Google's search query results. Viewing the page in Edit mode allows you to modify the web page's looks and ?spice? it with your own elements.
This tool could also come in handy for a better understanding of the elements constructing the page and how they are displayed. Or you can look at the fun side of the situation and create web screenshots of customized pages. There will be nothing altered on the original page and only your screen will look different.
The good news is that what you write integrates perfectly in the page as the characters will borrow the formatting options of the original text. Refreshing the page will not change the personal touch you added. The same is available if you access the different links on the page and go back. The editing is affected only by closing the page and re-opening it.
This goes hand in hand with Edit Page option located in the same menu. Though it has a different name, this option will actually display the source code of the web page displayed.
The same structure of the Favorites folder in IE is preserved in TheWorld Browser, so you will lose none of the bookmarks. The symbiotic connection between TheWorld Browser and IE goes as far as sending the same modifications from one to another. You can think about this as a backup solution in case one of them goes crazy and fails to recover.
For those of you that need to quickly hide some compromising tabs, TheWorld Browser proposes a solution I never encountered in any other similar software. By simply using the scroll wheel of your mouse, you can quickly hide the tabs and only the last one of them will be visible, irrelevant if it is active or not. This feature is way more useful then minimizing the application in system tray (also available in TheWorld Browser).
Taking a look in the Tools menu, you can see in a glimpse that the newest utility of a web browser is supported, namely mouse gestures. That is a feature IE7 cannot support without an add-on installed. When used in Maxthon, this feature will scratch your screen with a red line, defining the movement of your mouse. TheWorld Browser is classier and will only display an arrow indicating the up, down, left or right movement of the mouse.
Its form filling capabilities will spare you of the ?tedious? job of manually typing the details for logging into your accounts. For privacy reasons, the browser comes strapped with a History Cleaning tool that can erase the temporaries created by Internet browsing, typed URLs, cookies (no cookie selector available), browsing history, auto-complete data and recent navigation history. For automatically doing all these, you can set the application to perform a cleaning session at closing.
A very interesting option featured by TheWorld Browser is its built-in file manager. You can move around your files and manage them the easiest way possible as the file manager is nothing else but Microsoft's Windows Explorer. You can even benefit from the burning engine and manipulating the files is done in the traditional Explorer way.
This tool is available in the side bar TheWorld Browser comes equipped with. You can invoke it by either going in the View menu and select Side Bar from Toolbars or use the keyboard shortcut combination Ctrl+Shift+S or by pressing the open book-like button in the toolbar (right before the URL address bar). As soon as you make it visible, you can benefit from different other options of the application like Favorites, History, download History or the compatible plugins.
The list of plugins is currently pretty short, but the choices vary from RSS feed reader, system information (website ping speed, network bandwidth, IP or memory status), sticker, Google page rank, etc. These can be downloaded in an instant (the largest is 671KB, but most of them are under 70Kb in size) and the installation process is silent and automatic. The same goes for skins. They are automatically installed in the background and when the process is complete, you will be asked if you want to change the skin or not.
The Advanced options of the application hide a few gimmicks themselves, too. Searching a word in Google is as easy as highlighting the text and dragging it in the window. If there are more than 64 characters in the text, then you can set the browser to automatically save it to a TXT file (no more copy/paste in Notepad). These are part of the Mouse Actions section of Advanced Options, as well as enabling Ctrl+Alt+left-click to save a media file.
Mouse gestures are not limited to up, down, left and right. You can describe a number of 16 more moves on the screen in order to execute an action: close all tabs, close active tab, restore tab, refresh, zoom in page, go to home page (you can set two home pages in TheWorld Browser), open in IE, add to Favorites, etc.
The Good
The application is highly stable and behaves like no other. The number of features that make it extremely flexible fill the gap available in similar applications. Based on IE7, TheWorld Browser completes the suite of options and functionality every user is looking for.
The Bad
There still are issues to be considered and one of them is allowing the user much more freedom in configuring the ad-filter. But this is a problem with most browsers.
A help file wouldn't hurt a bit. Some of the users may feel the need of reading the explanation of the options as the developer intended them to be used.
Support for English in the forum would expand the market niche and more users will be able to contribute to its development.
The resource use is still pretty high. I opened a single tab and TheWorld Browser asked a bit over 55MB tribute. It is true that IE7 was a little under this value, but Maxthon ate only 46MB with four tabs opened.
The download tool provided by the program does not estimate the downloading time.
The Truth
It is amazing how pretentious we have become. Back in the days, a browser that loaded the web pages would have sufficed. Now, we cannot live without tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, search engine bars, auto fill forms option, bookmarks/favorites, safe browsing (protection against malicious ActiveX plugins), auto cleaning, download tool, session resume, etc. TheWorld Browser includes them all and more as the user can use both the download manager in IE7 and the native download manager.
Mouse Gestures section includes a myriad of options.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
