Remember those innocent days when the only two web browsers in the world were Internet Explorer and Netscape? (Whatever happened to Netscape?) Now there's a plethora — on my smart phone I can choose Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, the default browser, and now Dolphin. I just discovered Dolphin a couple of days ago. Quite honestly, until then I'd never heard of it.
But then, yesterday, Adobe updated Flash to version 11. Everything works fine on my computer (as expected) but on my Android devices there's big trouble. With this update, flash videos no longer play in either Firefox or Opera, my chosen browsers. Damn! They'll probably fix it — I'm sure they're highly motivated — but as of today it's broken. So, yesterday, I started looking for alternatives and stumbled across Dolphin. What a slick little browser!
If you've not seen Dolphin "gestures" in operation, it's worth taking a look. Quite simply, you draw a shape on your touchscreen and Dolphin recognizes that shape as a command to open a website. No typing, simply drawing! It also does a few navigational commands like going to the top of the page, zooming, etc.
I also like the speed dial page that acts as the browser's "homepage" where my most frequently used websites (e.g., www.lenswork.com, ahem) can be configured with a speed dial button. This is similar to Opera's "Start Page." Obviously, I'm only 24 hours in the playing with Dolphin on my phone and my Android tablet, but so far it's very nice, very functional, and could be my new favorite Android browser. I've only seen one hitch that is inconvenient and that's its inability to import my bookmarks from Firefox. They say this is a feature they are working on. Not a serious problem, but too bad its not already resolved.
Oh, and it plays Flash even after yesterday's version 11 update. Sweet!
