OpenWeb

Everyone has a favorite web browser by now, but this doesn’t stop new ones from trying to grab a slice of the navigation pie. Microsoft already rolled out a replacement for Internet Explorer, but it’s not quite what you’d expect, and if you want to look for alternatives that don’t take up many resources, OpenWeb might be a suitable candidate.

Before you can fully take advantage of what the application has to offer, you need to make sure that your computer is fitted with .NET Framework, because it was built on this platforms and is one of the main requirements.

On launch, the main window shows up, with a big empty space, because there’s no configured home page to greet you when running the application. What’s more, there isn’t even a built-in option to configure such a page, so you need to manually write down the address each time.

The visual design is pretty minimalistic, and although you can stretch the window borders to get a better view, content is only shown in a fixed spot and size. This also means there’s no possibility to enter full screen, with an impact on overall practicality.

Speed is decent, and OpenWeb manages to quickly take you to pages in a jiffy, with support for almost all kinds of content. Resource consumption is impressive, but poor implementation of features can trigger different script errors, which is not exactly the kind of thing you want to run into.

Moreover, the application lacks almost all elements that make a web browser popular. For instance, there’s no possibility to save frequently accessed pages to access them later on with a single click, not to mention no support for tabs, or history tracker.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that OpenWeb comes with good intentions, wanting to offer a simple, fast way of accessing your favorite web pages. However, it feels like it’s still in early stages of development, with various errors that trigger out of the bloom, and most functions you’re used to not implemented.