Mercury Web Browser Pro for iPad

Mozilla has retired its iOS app, Firefox Home, which allowed syncing of bookmarks, history, passwords, tabs and more between your desktop Firefox browser and your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. But not to worry! Mercury gives you syncing, and a wealth of nifty tablet browsing tricks all its own, including full-screen webpage view and gesture support. Unlike most iOS browsers, Mercury comes in both a free and 99 cent Pro version, which adds the Firefox syncing, Dropbox integration, and printing capability.

Interface
Mercury sports the traditional desktop-style tabs along the top of the app, surmounted by standard toolbar buttons?back and forward, home, favorite along the left, and settings, share, and full screen along the right. Separate address and search bars will be welcomed by those who prefer to compartmentalize those two activities. Competing Dolphin (3.5 stars) and Chrome (3.0 stars) iPad browsers use a single box for both activities and with iOS 6, Safari will too, but Maxthon and Opera Miniboth use two separate boxes.

Tab implementation is pretty good, though you won't find a new twist on touchscreen tabs as you do in Yahoo! Axis (3.5 stars) and Opera Mini. You can open up to ten tabs, compared with Safari's nine and Chrome and Maxthon's unlimited tabs. Dolphin tells you that performance will suffer if you open more than nine, which is probably good advice for anyone browsing on an iPad. An X in every Mercury tab means you can close any of them at any time without having to switch to the tab you want to close as you do with Dolphin and Maxthon. But you can't drag them to change their positions on the tab bar as you can in Chrome and Safari. In one nice tab-and-navigation help, you can hold down a link to open its page in a new tab, but Safari and Dolphin do this too.

Full-screen browsing is a big plus over the stock iPad browser and over Chrome and all other third-party browsers I've tested save Dolphin. This could change with iOS 6, though it's not clear that full screen will be supported on the iPad as well as on the iPhone. When you switch to full-screen view in Mercury, you get small overlay controls along the bottom, for back and forward, entering a new address, returning to standard view, and a circular control. This last looks like a TV remote control, with an Enter symbol in the middle. It's an interface innovation that lets you access pretty much everything you could with the browser's main, non-full-screen toolbar.

The pi?ce de r?sistance of Mercury's interface is its theming capability. None of the alternative iPad browsers I've tested?including Chrome, Dolphin, Maxthon?offered this window-dressing capability, even though their desktop counterparts did. I could choose from 11 options, from Christmas to Yakuza. One of the two wood-grain themes fit my sensibilities perfectly.

Gestures
Gestures are darned handy when you're viewing pages in full-screen, and Mercury offers eight of these, including those for tab switching, navigation, and moving to the top and bottom of a page. You can customize what action happens for any of these gestures from a choice of 19, but you can't create new gestures as you can in Dolphin. You're limited to the eight, while Dolphin doesn't have a limit, and lets you program 20 actions with gestures. But where Dolphin's gestures really top those in Mercury is that they let you create gestures to visit specific websites.

Extra Browsing Helpers
Like Safari and Maxthon, Mercury offers a Readability mode, hiding all but the main text and images of a Web article. When I tried this on PCMag.com's Hands on With the iPhone 5 article, I saw extraneous text at the end. I also prefer how Safari and Maxthon make the reading mode available via a button in the address bar, instead of Mercury's menu choice. Getting back to regular Web view was also easier in the others.

Like most alternative iPad browsers, Mercury lets you tell sites to show their full desktop version, rather than a dumbed-down mobile version. I do like how Mercury actually lets you tell sites you're one of 10 different specific browsers?IE 6 through 8, Chrome, Firefox, or Opera, for example. This means a site that displays correctly in IE but not in Safari will think you're using IE, so you get the correct webpage, but the setting is too buried compared with similar features in Chrome.

A couple things you won't find in Chrome or Safari, however, Mercury's Ad Blocker and dimmer features. The ad blocker spared me from having to see most third-party banner ads, and the dimmer is simply a brightness control that's more accessible than the one in the iPad Settings app.

Other hard-to-find features in Mercury are its download and file managers. You can hold your finger against a link on a Web page, and choose Download Link from the resulting menu. The file is downloaded to the iPad, where you may not be able to do anything with it. Not to worry: The browser comes with a viewer, and if that doesn't work, you can transfer the file to your PC using iTunes. Even better, you can upload the file to your Dropbox folder from a simple sharing button. But don't be deceived into thinking this is as snappy a procedure as it is on a desktop.

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