Hydra – More bang with this Browser
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 5:36 am
Looking for an alternative web browser? While Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are at the top of the heap for most used web browsers, they are, in my opinion, not all that interesting to look at. True enough, a web browser’s main purpose is to get the ‘Net surfer from one website to the other. If all web browsers can accomplish the same thing, wouldn’t it be nice to have one that is eye appealing, and preloaded with handy Internet tools?
The Hydra Browser not only gives a much needed face lift to the tried and true web browser, but is accompanied with several tools and services to assist with one’s Internet experience. One of the noticeable visual differences with the Hydra browser is the mimicry of the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon Bar interface. Instead of the standard File, View, etc. menu selections, the viewer is greeted with the Home, Edit, Favorites & Sidebars, Security & Settings, Tools, and RSS tabs.
The Home tab will appear familiar to web surfers, due to the inclusion of the standard navigation buttons (Back, Forward, Home, Refresh, and Stop). Included with this set is a New Tab button to quickly open additional tabs with the browser. These buttons are logically sorted into a section labeled Navigation.
There is a section called Browsing, with the choices Speed Browsing, and Simple Mode. Speed Browsing helps the browser cache and load web pages faster. Simple Mode can hide and unhide the Sidebar (we will cover this later). As the user proceeds to explore Hydra further, they will find that each tab has a similar flow with grouped functions.
On the right side of the Home tab, one may notice the Web Gallery section. Though other websites can be added to this area, there is a useful preset list of Internet sites like digg.com and answers.com to help the web surfer search for content.
Located under the Favorites and Sidebars tab, there is a section named Sidebars.
There are quite a few preset selections to choose from in this area. They include everything from Technorati Tags, and a WHOIS tool, to items like Newsreel for CNN News. So what happens when you select one of the choices from the arrows under each heading? The Hydra browser will add your choice to the Sidebar located on the left hand side of the screen. By default, the Sidebar is setup to display Favorites, RSS feeds, and an Internet Radio tab. Not only do you now have tabbed web pages, but tab-based tools within your web browser!
You can add as many tabbed items to the Sidebar as you would like. When there are more tabs than your screen can handle, small arrows will appear in the lower-left hand corner to help you scroll through all of your Sidebar tabs.
Looking past some of the aesthetics of Hydra, we cannot forget that it is still a web browser. Taking this into account, it should have the standard security features, like a pop-up blocker. Of course Hydra has this tool covered, as well as advertisement blocking, and a phishing checker. For what it is worth, the phishing checker tool did cause some websites, Gmail.com for example, to take a bit longer to load. However, there is a note of the tool pointing this fact out with regard to slower loading of certain web sites.
Clicking on the Security and Settings tab, then clicking on the large green tool icon will bring up the preferences list for Hydra. While one can turn the Ad and Pop-up blocking, and the phishing checker, on and off within the tabbed interface, users may want to further explore other options Hydra has to offer. Included in the options section is the ability to further limit what is downloaded to your computer. You can go so far as to block background images, sounds, and videos. A good example of this is an embedded video on a website that the ad blocking tool may not catch. Activating the Block Background Video would help in this instance by halting the download.
One other nice feature of Hydra that is built into the initial setup, are the interfaces for the Google and Babelfish translation engines. If you click on the Tools tab, and then look for the Translation section, you will find the options of using the Google or Babelfish translation utilities.
This quick menu is incredibly handy if one should stumble across web pages, in their Internet travels, that may have information not in their native tongue. Before someone ventures out on to the world wide web trying to translate this and that with these tools, it would be a good idea to find a multi-lingual website, and test the tools first. While they are probably very useful in forwards and reverse language translation, it never hurts to do some spot checking first.
In total, the Hydra browser does not necessarily more tools compared to other web browsers. However, you do not have to scour as many plug-in websites to add functionality to Hydra, as they come preloaded. Add to this an easy to navigate display, with logically grouped buttons, and it makes for a very nice web browser to have.
You can also check out another very cool alternative browser called Flock, which is the browser to use if you want to stay connected with your social network.
Technorati Tags: Hydra,web browser,tabbed browsing,Web 2.0,speed browsing
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Interesting idea.. Finally some true innovation in how a browser looks.
Too bad there is no version for Linux yet…
Why wont hydra load up on Windows XP?