Although I’m a loyal Chrome man on the desktop, I tend not to care much for competing browsers on iOS… not because they don’t often do functionality better than Mobile Safari, because let’s face it, they often do. However, Mobile Safari’s privilege of being the default browser on iOS means there’s a lot of functionality you just can’t really do with an alternative browser.
It’s a pity, because if not for that, Terra for iPad would get a sensational recommendation: not only does it have an attractively minimal interface that supports tabbed browsing (as well as nifty full-screen functionality that quickly whisks the tabs out of the way when you want to be immersed), but also a very intuitive library of multitouch gestures. Best of all, it’s free. Give it a shot.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
14 responses to “Terra Is A Free Alternative iPad Browser That Does A Lot Of Things Right”
I just found Terra also. Finally a really good alt-browser to Safari.
Try iCab Mobile, its even better, offers Dropbox sync and downloads and it is universal. I use it a lot both on my iPad an on my iPod Touch
Agreed, it’s pretty nifty.
Didn’t Microsoft lose an antitrust lawsuit by forcing IE to be part of Windows? How is it different with iOS only allowing Safari?
market share. microsoft lost because they leveraged their monopoly on the desktop to force IE on people.
Bad news, Apple is at it again. I was just informed by the developer that Apple has taken Terra out of the App Store. Below is what marketing sent me.
“Thank you for the response. Currently Apple took Terra off sales. Please note that Terra reinstallation is impossible at this moment. We will try to bring back our product as soon as it will be allowed.
Best regards,
Oleg Baranovskyi,
Marketing Manager,
Readdle Inc.”
I bet you they took it off because it mimics iOS 5’s new browser interface /lol