Why use a different browser on iPad/iPhone?

[SilentLoner]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

I'm currently using icab on both iPad and iPhone but I'm yet to see the difference.

 

[saving107]

I don't know about iCab, but browsers like Atomic offer the ability to have tabs open side-by-side (like a desktop browser), which means that i can go to a site that streams video (live.twit.tv) and listen to a show wile browsing other sites in a different tab. The iOS Safari browser don't offer this functionality, once you switch to a different tab, the video turns off. Also, Atomic Browser does a better job of caching websites so that it doesn't have to re-load the page as often like Safari.

 

[meechy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

I'm currently using icab on both iPad and iPhone but I'm yet to see the difference.

Tabs.

 

[Surely]

What saving107 said.

I strongly dislike Safari.

 

[ldburroughs]

Power consumption?

Is there any validity to the claim that the other browsers consume more power? I was considering using one of the browsers that handle flash by converting it offsite for download but don't want to mess with it if there is a significant drop in battery life.

 

[ajohnson253]

People want tabs, or a full screen browser etc etc. Different browsers have more options or less, I enjoy just using safari due to the stability and how fluid it is.

 

[wyneken]

Of course a lot of this comes down to personal preference, "look and feel," and all that. But I like iCab because of tabs (including the crucial "Open in background tab" feature, which greatly speeds browsing), direct downloads from the web, quick in-page scrolling, and the multitude of available settings to personalize the browser.

Atomic seems to offer a similar feature set and comparable speed and solidity -- I've just gotten comfortable with iCab and see no need to switch.

Safari, by comparison, seems dumbed-down.

None of these browsers should differ greatly in power requirements because they're all built on WebKit. (As is Grazing, though that seems to have memory-management issues.)

 

[SilentLoner]

I do like icab but i do find it not overly needed.

 

[walie]

with icab mobile, i can view pages in full screen, set the browser to act as firefox to avoid all the stupid iphone specific websites, download files, upload files to dropbox, save webpages to instapaper without setting up the bookmark, change font sizes, clip webpages to evernote, use gestures, enable private browsing

there are other features, i just use the above ones the most