O3Mobi's Ozone is an interesting new web browser available for S60 3rd Edition Feature pack 1 and 2 phones. There's also a version forUIQ 3 touch screen devices. Download Ozone from o3mobi.com. Like the default S60 browser, Ozone is based on the open source WebKit engine. It has some great features including support for advanced web technologies like Ajax and HTML5. It is an initial Alpha release with a few glitches but is quite usable and stable.
Ozone is a direct browser like the default S60 browser or Opera Mobile. Meaning that unlike proxy based browsers such as Opera Mini, Skyfire or UCWEB data does not pass through a central server that compresses and reformats pages. Direct browsers are slower but inherently more secure because they maintain end to end HTTPS encryption. Proxy based browsers must decrypt content in order to reformat and compress it. Some online banking sites block proxy based browsers out of security concerns.
Ozone is fast for a direct browser. O3mobi claims it's three times faster than Opera Mobile. I wasn't able to reproduce that but it is the fastest of the current S60 direct browsers in my tests. The table below compares page load times for Ozone, S60 WebKit, Opera Mobile 8.65 and Opera Mini 4.2. Testing was done on a Nokia N95-3 with a 1.5 mbit/sec WiFi connection.
Here's a quick run down of Ozone's features:
Multiple Windows A menu item lets you open new windows and switch between windows. It isn't possible to open a link in a new window, however.
There are nine zoom levels ranging tiny to huge (top two images). Text is sharp and readable even at quite low zoom levels. Zooming is easy thanks to shortcut keys; 5 to zoom in, 6 to zoom out.
Bookmark management is very basic in this version, you can create bookmarks but there is no way to move, delete or rename them .
URL Completion seems quite smart, as soon as I typed "e" , Ozone offered me engadget.com, ebay.com, ebay.co.uk and easy-share.com as possible completions.
Navigation is pretty basic, there are no page up, page down, jump to column or top/bottom of page keys, only line by line scrolling. There is in-page search which helps a bit with finding things on the page. Scrolling seems quite slow and "laggy" on large, complex pages like the desktop versions of iGoogle and Engadget. The only shortcut keys are for zooming in and out. Everything else is buried in a menu. It takes five clicks to bookmark the current page and nine to navigate to the bookmarks list.
Ozone sends a user agent header (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_2; en-us; ozone 0.9) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13) which properly
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posted by Dennis Bournique
May 12, 2009 @ 11:07 am
7 View Comments
