Orca Browser – Great Choice For Those Interested in Trying a New Browser
When asked about browsers, many of us know just a few names. But are Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Avant and the ubiquitous Internet Explorer so great and complete that there’s no need to look further? I don’t think so. None of the popular ones is perfect yet, so if you keep on searching for the one to satisfy you more could do no harm.
I’m not saying Orca Browser is the perfect one, but it surely represents an interesting and serious option for the ones still looking for the tool that satisfies in a better way their web browsing needs and maybe even some more.
Orca Browser comes from the producers of the Avant Browser, another powerful browser with excellent user reviews. The main difference between Orca and Avant is that Avant is based on Internet Explorer while Orca is based on Firefox 3. This means that Orca offers pretty much the same features that made Firefox so famous and appreciated, such as the popular Mozilla add-ons. But it also comes with its own extra goodies, such as the faster page rendering speed, the really numerous and comprehensive customization options or the Online Profile Storage service that lets you save online various user data (passwords, RSS feeds, bookmarks, etc.) and synchronize them whenever you want between Orca installations found on different machines.
When installing the Orca Browser 1.2 build 1 you may choose between a standard installation mode and a custom one that lets you choose individual options to be installed.
Then, once installed, when launched for the first time, Orca got me a little confused as I couldn’t easily figure out how to open a new tab. Being used to Firefox, I was expecting the “New Window” button to open a completely new window once pressed, as the “New Window” menu option of Firefox does, but it actually opens a new tab. If you use the “File – New” menu option of Orca you may choose to open a new blank page, to reopen the current viewed page, to open a page whose address is currently found in the clipboard or to open the browser:home page. No matter which one of these options you choose, any of them will be opened as a new tab in the same Orca’s window. I couldn’t figure it out yet how to open a completely new Orca window, if possible, but I really don’t think this matters. Instead I really like the browser:home feature which provides quick access to the most visited, the history and the recently bookmarked pages, as well as to a web search option.
Orca Browser is a truly comprehensive and feature-rich software. Except for the already noticed “browser:home” and open page from clipboard features, plenty of other options, functions, tools and enhancements are available. It’s pretty hard to mention them all. There’s also a side bar that provides quick access to bookmarks, RSS feeds, history and the blocked URLs lists and management options. There’s the easy-to-use and very handy Online Storage service that lets you back up various user data and settings and synchronize them between different Orca installations. There’s pretty much the same comprehensive right-click context menu as in Firefox 3.5, that provides the handy “View Source” and “View Page Info” options, among others. There’s a handy Google Translate feature embedded right next to the address bar. And many other more.
The Online Profile Storage service worked like a charm. Signing up for a new account was easy and fast as it required only entering the e-mail address, the password and a verification code. There was no need to confirm the creation of the new account by checking the e-mail or other similar stuff. Backing up the data and synchronizing it was also fast and worked without any problem. Note that switching the accounts will restart the browser whatsoever.
You may also easily import the user data from another account, as well as import the favorites from Internet Explorer (even importing the favorites from the infamous IE 6 worked flawlessly), or import the bookmarks from Opera and Mozilla Firefox.
The bookmarks may be easily organized. Moreover, you can check for the availability of the listed bookmarks. A reliable and useful RSS Reader is also available.
The way the “Customize Buttons” option looks reminded me somehow more of Opera than of Firefox, but anyway, it’s a comprehensive and handy feature that will surely please those users that like to customize their browser in its every detail.
Another handy feature is the Auto-fill option that lets you save the content of filled forms, including passwords and other personal data. Then you may quickly fill in such forms with just one single mouse click.
The mouse gestures is another feature that reminds me of Opera. It’s a nice feature anyway, and the mouse gestures can be easily enabled or disabled as well as customized in various ways.
Check the “Tools” menu of Orca and you can see for yourself how powerful and feature-rich this browser is. The Google Translate feature, mail, auto-refresh, add-ons, the Mozilla’s specific Error Console and many more can be found and easily managed here. Here you may also enable the reliable AD blocker, select one of the 20 skins, change the interface language, or clear various records such as typed addresses, recent pages, cookies, auto-complete web forms, history, temporary Internet files, searched keywords, blocked AD lists, blocked popups list, or all these records altogether, with only one single mouse click. There’s also the possibility to quickly and easily disable pictures, sounds, Flash animations, videos, scripts or Java applets.
Orca Browser’s “Options” window offers a lot of customization features regarding almost every aspect of this software. Interface-related options, browsing settings RSS, auto-complete, tray icon, search engines, popup and AD blocker, URL alias, Online Storage, etc – almost everything can be controlled and customized.
Well… briefly, Orca Browser looks good and works even better. If for Avant, no matter how good it would be, you could still think is based on the not-so-liked Internet Explorer, then for Orca, which is based upon Firefox 3, this issue is gone.
Orca provides the advantages of a typical Gecko based browser but also comes with its additional ones. Its speed is really great, its memory usage is low, its features cover pretty much all you could need from a serious web browser, and for an Opera fan as I am, it simply looks good in every aspect. I can see no drawbacks in using it. It doesn’t offer that “something special” to make me quit Opera yet, but it surely represents the next option, if I ever consider changing my currently favorite browser.
For the open-minded, I take the risk of saying that Orca Browser is just as good as Firefox, if not even better.
To summarize, Orca Browser is great. You may also see this browser in action here, as a video presentation of its main features, part of Downloadtube’s review.
Rainer Weiss - Downloadtube.com editor
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