A few weeks ago I tested Mercury Web Browser Pro for iPad, which in my first impressions didn’t do so well. I went out again and had a look at a few more browsers, and this week’s choice is iCab. And at a price twice the cost of Mercury (£1.19 to be exact).

At first run I tried to use my company internal websites to see if I could work with them, since Mercury had a problem with popups. Well, the first time I tried my pages everything seemed to work fine, however on second try the next day they would not. Really annoying. I have been playing with the settings, even cleared the cache and uninstalled and reinstalled the app, but no joy. A real shame!

So, now that we established that the app failed at the most critical task for me (I know, it is a really trivial thing, pop-ups, but because this is how the in-house system works it therefore means that I won’t be able to use iCab for work) let’s have a look in more detail and see if iCab can redeem itself (also, screenshots after the break)…

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So I have been trying out a new browser for the iPad, and seeing that the Mercury Web Browser Pro is currently only £0.59 I couldn’t say no.

So far, I am enjoying it, it looks nice, the tabs are nicely done, albeit the buttons are a bit small; however, I found 3 points with it that made me reconsider my buying choice a little:

1. Bookmarks import. The import went fine, however managing bookmarks didn’t. Some folders it would let me move, some it wouldn’t, and no matter how the folders are spelled, some it just would not move or even let me edit. Very annoying.

2. Pop-ups! Safari can handle pop-ups, so why can’t Mercury? A real shame as an intranet application we use requires pop-ups for confirmation and data managing, so cannot use Mercury for that task

3. Bookmarks grid. Not sure what I am doing wrong, no matter what I press I cannot find an easy way to move bookmarks to that grid! It’s probably a user error on my part, it is just frustrating that I do not seem to be able to do that.

Overall, it looks like a decent browser, but these 3 issues need to be resolved until I can really consider it a worthy replacement to Safari…

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