Yet, here it is three years on, and we’re still waiting for that “interactive and intimate” browsing experience (and hoverboards, for that matter).

A recent study conducted by Onswipe revealed that iPads account for a whopping 98.1 percent of tablet traffic on websites. Despite this, the actual experience of surfing the web on an iPad is underwhelming at best and infuriating at worst. Simply put, today’s state-of-the-art tablet browsers, especially Safari, don’t do the Internet, the user, or the iPad justice. Apple wasn’t totally wrong: The iPad has proven itself to be a revolutionary device that absolutely has the potential to offer a transformative web-browsing experience. It just hasn’t yet. Which means there’s a gap in the market for an intuitive, immersive, innovative iPad browser. Whoever develops it is going to win big.

Safari is deliberately hobbled

As more and more of the services we use on a daily basis have migrated to the cloud, the web browser has become the computer’s most essential app. And when we surf the web on a computer, we encounter few obstacles. Though we may have to scale the occasional paywall or sit through an obligatory five seconds of an ad before accessing content, the navigational experience of a computer user is fluid and frictionless — as anyone who’s gone down the rabbit hole researching alpaca breeds or underrated Val Kilmer films at 3 a.m. can attest.

Surfing the web is far less pleasurable on an iPad. Visiting a site frequently presents one with a pop-up and a dilemma: Download the app, or endure the diminished experience of a website designed for another device. Safari is essentially a limited version of its desktop sibling – and apps almost always provide a better experience. (Or, as Firefox UX Lead Alex Limi has summed it up, it’s ”kind of sucky.”)

Of course, this is sort of the point. It’s in Apple’s, or any tablet maker’s, best interest to make using (read: buying) apps preferable to visiting websites. Safari is designed to make using web-based apps on an iPad inconvenient, if not impossible. In response, most companies focus their mobile development resources on creating native apps rather than optimizing their content for tablet browsers. The result is a browsing experience full of flow-breakers. In short, on a computer the browsing experience is limitless; on a tablet, it’s filled with blind alleys and false doors.

Why web browsing still matters

There is an impulse among some to assume that the rise of apps – or, more sensationally, the death of the website – will eventually render browsers, or at least mobile ones, obsolete. While it’s true that more and more content is consumed through apps, and that personalization has shifted our approach to content from searching to getting, the average number of Google searches per day has steadily increased – by an astounding one trillion each year.

But even if we accept that the importance of mobile websites is on the wane, there’s no reason for mobile browsers to beat them to an early grave. There is plenty of room for resurrection, but only if we throw out desktop-based notions of what a browser looks and feels like. Freed of all the tasks and responsibilities that other apps accomplish, tablet browsers should offer an absorbing, engaging innovative experience. Further, they should evolve the idea of what a browser is and can be on a tablet. Take GarageBand, for example: The iPad version is infinitely more interactive and tactile than the desktop version.

I’ve mostly been picking on Safari. As the native browser for a tablet that accounts for 98.1 percent of tablet traffic, its influence is enormous. However, that’s not to say there aren’t more innovative browsers taking steps in the right direction. Dolphin, for instance, allows you to create your own gestures for various functions. And though there are any number of other browsers contending in the space, as of yet none has emerged as the standard-setter or must-have. Mozilla’s forthcoming iPad browser, Junior, which completely throws out desktop-inspired design and focuses on simplicity, could be a contender, but for now we have to wait and see.

What we’ve lost

As it currently stands, the shoehorning of hobbled desktop browsers onto tablets is forcing us to move from a browser to app-navigation experience. This is not necessarily a negative development, but we must carefully consider what we lose as our web experience becomes siloed, or, alternately, take into consideration in our app design how we can ensure and better enable the type of surfing serendipity that made web browsing valuable in the first place.

The web as we have known it was designed to facilitate the browsing experience – to be a boundlessly linked rhizomatic structure of hypertext. But we have quite willingly begun to fence it off as we have shifted our experience to the iPad and individual apps. Even worse, though, is that most of the apps and services that have attempted to fill the browsing void have only further constricted the experience of the web via the tablet.

Under the claim of “personalization” and making the browsing and discovery experience more individually valuable and meaningful, they really provide little more than constricting customization confined to picks of an editor or your social graph. Most of it is expected or retreaded.What is lost is the magic of blazing a trail from one page to the next, the anticipation of revealing the unknown that lurks behind the next link. Personalization shouldn’t be an either/or experience of web discovery, and neither should browsing on the tablet.

While we will continue to make strides in personalizing the web, and hopefully even enhancing the web experience on tablets, I’m also looking forward to a browser that lets me fall down an unexpected rabbit hole once in awhile. As long as there are alpacas and Val Kilmer movies, there will be surfers. It’s up to developers to provide the hoverboards.

Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trapit, a personalized content discovery platform.

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From a consumer app perspective, the two companies have remarkable similarities. Opera’s browsers are best known for using server-side compression as a way of saving on data costs, and Skyfire uses server-side rendering for video, making it a go-to browser for those who really miss Flash on today’s platforms. This deal is doubtlessly about uniting those two strengths, but that’s not its main thrust.

This is really about mobile carriers: about offering them more control over the quality of their services, and about giving them ways to monetize their subscribers’ mobile web usage. And it may just be a push whose time has come. The key there is the carriers’ current shift to software-defined networking (SDN), which in itself is intended to give operators the ability to fine-tune parts of their networks in ways that were not previously possible.

As it happens, Skyfire offers operators a video optimization technology called Rocket, that is supposed to free up capacity – as much as 60 percent, the company claims — at cell sites that are currently feeling the strain of the mobile video explosion. Skyfire also has a toolbar called Horizon that carriers can preinstall on their phones in order to offer customers context-relevant coupons, for example. Mountain View-based Skyfire has three deals with U.S. carriers for the Rocket Optimizer and Horizon (Verizon was a big investor), and is apparently trialling them with ten other operators around the world.

Opera, meanwhile, has its Turbo compression technology, but it also has a mobile advertising platform called Mediaworks and a carrier service called Web Pass, which allows them to offer pay-per-use mobile web access through the browser. Across these two companies, there’s a lot to play with –- in terms of both technology and geographical reach (Skyfire is strong in North America and Opera in the developing world).

As Opera CEO Lars Boilesen put it in a statement:

“Both companies have evolved far beyond their browser roots. Skyfire adds capabilities to our portfolio around video, app optimization, smartphones and tablets, and strength in North America. With video expected to consume over two-thirds of global mobile bandwidth by 2015, and as time spent on Android and iOS apps explodes, we are excited to extend Opera’s solutions for operators.”

In the same statement, Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck (who will hang onto that title while also becoming Opera’s Operator Business Unit EVP) said:

“Opera practically invented cloud compression to improve mobile user experience, and the team at Skyfire is proud to join forces and advance cloud solutions together. Opera’s over 100 carrier relationships, global sales team, and delivery organization can accelerate the global commercialization of Skyfire’s technology. Opera’s Mediaworks advertising unit with AdMarvel, Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising will strengthen Skyfire Horizon by offering mobile operators a complete turnkey solution including ad optimization, ad sales, and rich analytics. The synergies across all the product lines for both companies are tremendous.”

Glueck also wrote a separate blog post that’s worth a read. In it, he expresses excitement about pushing Skyfire’s technology into the developing world, and also gives a nod to the rise of SDN:

“This is a major milestone for our Skyfire family and validation of our vision for cloud computing and network function virtualization (NFV) to solve huge problems on mobile networks, from handling the explosion of video over cell towers, to finding ways for mobile operators to regain relevance and monetize in an over-the-top world. Back in 2007, when Nitin Bhandari and Erik Swenson started Skyfire, the idea that Tier One mobile network operators would entrust the cloud for core network roles was considered bleeding edge. Now it’s a topic everyone is talking about, and Skyfire is making NVF combined with Software Defined Networking a reality.”

So what’s next for the merged companies? For a start, they will out new products for carriers over the next year that build on Web Pass with new ways of offering mobile web access, such as “toll-free data” and “ad-supported data”.

And by the way, if you love your Flash video and you’re worried about the future of the Skyfire browser, don’t be – Skyfire will continue to develop and support it.

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That was then, this is now. But it turns out the popularity of Opera Mini is still growing like mad – in fact, last December saw the biggest month-on-month growth for the tiny browser in its history, up 6.3 percent from 195.5 million to 207.8 million users. The Mini servers handled more than 143 billion pages and compressed more than 12 petabytes of data during the month. What gives?

The answer is a bit of a mixed bag. Firstly, the big growth in mobile internet usage these days is in emerging markets, and data can be much more costly – relative to earnings – in such markets than in the ‘developed’ world. This is why other players are also adopting compression techniques, such as Blaast and, somewhat controversially, Nokia.

As Norway’s Opera says in its latest State of the Mobile Web report, issued on Thursday, the earliest adopters of Opera Mini were in Europe and the U.S., with Asia hot on their heels. Adoption in Latin America took off back in 2011, and Africa in particular saw growth at the end of last year. Bear in mind that we’re now talking those areas where internet-capable feature phones and low-end smartphones are becoming people’s first computers.

Interestingly, Opera says 32 percent of its users are now on smartphones – that takes into account the 21.5 million users of Opera Mobile, which is designed specifically for smartphones, but as Opera Mini users outnumber Opera Mobile users roughly 10:1 that percentage spells big-time adoption of the lightweight browser on smartphones, too.

But there is another reason why December was so hot for Opera Mini, and that’s good old seasonality. As Pål Unanue-Zahl, the man behind Opera report, told me: “December is generally a strong month for the sale of mobile phones and a lot of users are discovering the internet on their newly acquired smartphones.”

Either way, Opera Mini is still doing really well, and its popularity should serve as a barometer for anyone designing apps for the emerging markets. Remember, not everyone has the option of being a data hound, and lightweight still rules for many.

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Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it’s an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser – you can’t enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content.

However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top – click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a ‘Silicon Valley’ tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like ‘Moore’s Law’. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery.

What’s more – and here it really differs from StumbleUpon, in my experience – you never see the same content twice.

“It’s a new way to consume content,” co-founder Marko Anderson said. “We want the interface to be as simple and fluid as possible. Based on my usage of the service, I get very different things coming to me. If I choose ‘Silicon Valley’ and somebody else does too, the content might be different.”

I’ve not yet had a chance to play with the beta extensively, and of course it would take significant usage before it’s possible to evaluate how successful the algorithms are, but – if it works – Futureful could be a great way to kill time and learn new things. If you’re an iPad user, of course.

As Anderson pointed out, “mobile devices aren’t great for typing”. Add to that the need for enough space to show the tag row, and it makes sense that Futureful is launching as a tablet app.

“We started with web development, but the tablet is the ultimate consumption device, where the information finds you,” Anderson told me. “We haven’t ruled out a web version, but the smoothness in terms of the cleanness of the UI has just been better on the tablet.”

And Android? “We have no plans yet, but we have had some of the biggest players in the mobile industry ask us to build for them.” Same goes for the iPhone – maybe in the future, but first things first.

Also, there’s no business model yet. That said, if Futureful takes off I’d imagine there would be many options for making money off it.

Here’s a video:

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

The quick admission and apology is likely to be an attempt to make that fine as small as possible.

As you may recall, Microsoft reached an agreement with the European Commission at the end of 2009 over the automatic bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. To satisfy the regulators, it promised to make sure Windows users got a clear choice of default browsers at the point of installation — allowing people to easily avoid IE if they wished. This was done through a so-called ‘browser choice screen’, or BCS, and Microsoft also agreed to submit a compliance report to the regulators every year.

The last of those reports was submitted in December, and in it Microsoft assured the EC that every Windows user was getting the BCS when they set up the operating system, so they could easily install browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

Except, it turns out, that assurance was not true.

On Tuesday, the EC revealed that it was launching fresh proceedings against Microsoft “in order to investigate whether the company has failed to comply with its 2009 commitments” – specifically, whether it was the case that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 did not bring the BCS with it. Not long after, Microsoft apologetically fessed up:

Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7. The BCS software has been delivered as it should have been to PCs running the original version of Windows 7, as well as the relevant versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, while we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”

Microsoft says it started distributing the BCS software to Windows 7 SP1 machines on 3 July, a couple of business days after “discovering the problem”. It also claims the software is now available for all new PCs bearing that OS and service pack.

The company has retained external lawyers to conduct a formal investigation into the “technical error”, and these lawyers will provide their report to the EC when it is ready. Microsoft has also promised the EC that it will extend the compliance period – the five-year period during which the company has to submit those annual reports – by 15 months.

“We understand that the Commission will review this matter and determine whether this is an appropriate step for Microsoft to take. We understand that the Commission may decide to impose other sanctions,” the software giant added in a quote that must send shivers down the spines of its shareholders.

Meanwhile, the EC – which was fully aware by today that Microsoft really had breached its agreement – used its statement to roll out an excellent impression of a ticked-off teacher.

“We take compliance with our decisions very seriously. And I trusted the company’s reports were accurate. But it seems that was not the case, so we have immediately taken action,” competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said. “If following our investigation, the infringement is confirmed, Microsoft should expect sanctions.”

Microsoft and the European Commission have had a stormy relationship over the years, to put it mildly. The browser case was arguably the smaller of two antitrust investigations into the company, the other being the server software case that saw Microsoft hit with a $600m fine eight years ago, only to have much more added on top because it still refused to live up to its agreements.

Plus ça change…

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The incident stems from a highly publicized incident in February in which a Stanford graduate student discovered that Google was using trickery in order to by-pass ad-blocking settings on Apple’s Safari browser. The scheme involved coding ads to masquerade as form submissions in order to install advertising cookies (see my colleague Tom Krazit’s great explanation of the tricky business — and its relation to Google+ — here).

While other companies and app makers may have engaged in similar chicanery, the Federal Trade Commission appears determined to hit deep-pocketed Google hard. The Journal reports that the FTC’s $22.5 million punishment is based on Google’s failure to tell the truth about its advertising practices.

The federal agency has in recent years emerged as the country’s de facto chief privacy cop even though the laws governing the agency aren’t particularly designed to do this. While other countries have special Privacy Commissioners, the FTC instead relies on its traditional powers to regulate “deceptive” and “unfair” trade practices.

The FTC recently used these powers to slap a 20-year “consent decree” on Google to punish it for missteps related to its ill-fated Google Buzz social network. That consent decree in turn provided the FTC with powers to fine Google $16,000 a day if it violated the terms of the decree. That is what appears to have happened here: Google didn’t comply with terms of the decree that requires it to tell users about its advertising practices.

Google also faces a series of private class action suits over the Safari incident. The news of the FTC fine comes at a time when every large technology company is confronting lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny over their privacy practices.

(Image by Suzanne Tucker via Shutterstock)

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Now renamed Pocket Island, the browser-based game’s code is now available on GitHub. But the real story lies beneath that headline. Wooga will still be reviewing Pocket Island pull requests, but it’s stopped its own development on the title — and indeed all HTML5 mobile games.

“We’re shutting it down because we just don’t see enough users and there are just some technology issues we can’t handle,” Wooga spokesperson Sina Kaufmann told me. “We have to focus, because this [social gaming] market is so competitive and fast-growing.”

The games developer is still pals with Facebook when it comes to the desktop, but given that Wooga was a launch partner for the extension of the Facebook Platform to mobile all of eight months ago, the HTML5 move is pretty dire news for the social network.

Why? Because of the problems cited by Wooga regarding mobile HTML5 gaming – problems that don’t look set to get cleared up anytime soon:

User engagement for Magic Land Island was, in a word, atrocious – five percent coming back for another play the next day, versus almost 50 percent for the native iOS version of hit game Diamond Dash.

Wooga’s helpfully provided a chart to show how bad things got for the game :

Faced with a trainwreck like that, it’s hard to blame Wooga for pulling out. As Kaufmann told me, the company is keen on HTML5, and releasing the game as open source serves to “value what the engineers achieved”, but the tech’s just not there yet.

So who’s responsible for that tech? Well, Facebook for one, but also the other companies working on the still-not-fully-baked HTML5 standard over at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Mobile browser companies such as, er, Apple and Google.

Now, standards take time to evolve. There’s also more than one way of interpreting Facebook’s mobile HTML5 play – as an aggressive move to become the platform taking a cut of app sales, rather than Apple or Google, or as an investment in the standardised platform of the future.

The problem is, it’s not really in the interests of either Google or Apple to have mobile HTML5 apps – certainly performance-hungry money factories such as games – work as well as native apps. Why give up that 30 percent cut?

Of the problems cited by Wooga, some are fixable and some not so much. Facebook’s new App Center could (over time) make discoverability less of an issue. Mobile broadband connectivity is a bigger problem – it’s not going to be ubiquitous for a while yet, at least not to the degree where it can allow a native-rivalling experience. And as for performance, well, that requires a common motivation from a lot of players.

If Facebook was hoping to pull the revenue rug out from under the native smartphone platforms anytime soon, right now it must be feeling sorely disappointed.

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While the analysis of such an outcome makes sense, there’s a key problem that history has already proven true: Odds of a third-party browser on iOS becoming a major success are very limited at best.

Why? Because although Apple now allows such browsers — it originally didn’t — none of them can be set as the default browser, meaning all links in emails, texts or other apps will always open in Safari, regardless of what other browsers are installed. That’s a big usability barrier that gives Safari a competitive advantage on iOS, no matter how great Chrome is. Ironically, Google (as well as Mozilla) are grumbling about Microsoft giving its own Internet Explorer an advantage on Windows 8 as well.

Macquarie’s note suggests that Chrome for iOS will get approved this quarter and is likely to have such limitations. I can’t speak to the timing, but I have zero doubt that the current default browser limitation will apply to a version of Chrome on Apple devices, just as it does with Dolphin HD, Opera and others.

Apple has always had full control of its smartphones and tablets; it’s one of the platforms selling points and there’s simply no reason to think that’s going to change. And while Chrome for Android can sync bookmarks with its desktop counterpart, so too can Safari between its mobile and desktop versions. The mobile version of Chrome now shows open desktop tabs as well, but there’s no reason Apple can’t add such functionality through its iCloud service.

Much of Macquarie’s analysis hinges on the believe that mobile browser wars are beginning, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the expectation that Google will gain a large benefit from releasing Chrome on iOS is based on how Google has done in the desktop browser wars and that’s a huge mistake in my opinion. The desktop paradigm is decades old, and to assume the mobile market will simply follow the same path is an error in judgment. Chrome for iOS may indeed appear and some few will use it, but Google isn’t likely to gain much. Instead, users are best poised to get a benefit as some of the better features in Chrome could find their way in future versions of mobile Safari.

Thumbnail image courtesy of MyDroidWorld

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Updated. Amazon in late September launched new Kindle devices including Kindle Fire, a tablet that makes content a centerpiece of its tablet strategy. It also announced a new browser, Amazon Silk, that proposed to use cloud to offer a blazing fast experience. Silk’s hybrid browser architecture quickly triggered some privacy concerns. Amazon weighed in on my queries and clarified their position.

Nevertheless, I have continued to receive feedback, some private and some over various social networks. One that stands out is from MathewMatthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, a hosted proxy service provider based in San Diego San Francisco who shared his thoughts. Prince, (you can follow him on Twitter @eastdakota) who teaches cyber law at John Marshall where he serves on the Board of the Center for Information Technology & Privacy Law, believes Amazon will continue to face “technical, legal, and privacy concerns with Silk.” He points out that similar attempts in the past have not been very successful, even for Google.

Amazon’s Silk Browser may be a game changer, but the history of similar efforts shows the company may face significant headaches in getting it to work. The Silk Browser loads pages through a proxy which can have a number of benefits to end users. Depending on how aggressive the Silk proxy is, it could speed up browser performance, allow Kindle devices to get away with slower, less expensive processors, and potentially even increase the battery life by offloading web rendering.

The Silk Browser it isn’t really new technology and it’s not a slam dunk that it will work. The Opera Mini browser uses a proxy which has several of the same features as Amazon’s Silk. Google tried something similar back in 2005 with their Web Accelerator Plugin. While the plugin is no longer available, the support documents still are. Google discontinued support in early 2008 after a number of issues arose — similar issues that are likely to be faced by Amazon with Silk.

I predict that Amazon is likely to face technical, legal, and privacy concerns with Silk. Technically, the biggest challenge will likely be cache invalidation. If I visit my bank website and my account page is cached, Amazon needs to be 100 percent certain that when someone else visits the same bank they never see my account information. From the technical specifications, it appears that Amazon is only caching static resources such as images. While that will solve many of the cases, there will still be places that Silk could end up leaking private data (e.g., a stock photo or porn site that charges for access to its photos).

Unlike existing proxies (like CloudFlare) or traditional CDNs whose clients are the website owners, Amazon’s clients are the web browsers, so they are copying content without the content owners’ explicit permission. This could lead to copyright headaches. While there are safe harbors for service providers caching content, Amazon’s nebulous status between network provider, retailer, and even publisher could muddle their case in court and make them a tempting target. The more Amazon alters the content in order to increase performance, the more jeopardy they will put themselves in.

Finally, Silk potentially puts Amazon in the privacy crosshairs. It appears they are planning to subsidize some of the Kindle’s pricing with advertising, and that advertising will likely be most effective if it is targeted using browsing data gleaned from Silk. Users and regulators can react very strongly if they feel their information is being sold without their permission, and Silk has the potential to score high on the creepiness factor. These privacy concerns have a way of blowing up unexpectedly with regulators resulting in substantially burdensome regulation. In this case, Amazon has already made many government enemies as they’ve fought Internet sales tax initiatives. Going after them for privacy violations may prove a tempting target for lobbyists that [are] already trying to demonize them.

My hunch is that Amazon will find a way to pull it off, but it won’t entirely be smooth for Silk.

What do you think about Prince’s take?

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Sleipnir, for those not versed in Norse mythology, was the eight-legged horse of the god Odin. It’s also the name of an iOS browser that has a reputation for doing things a little differently. Sleipnir developer Fenrir is now bringing it to the Mac with the release of a new beta. Since it’s highly unusual for a browser to be released for iOS before OS X, we thought we’d take a look at the things Sleipnir does differently from other browsers on the Mac.

Interface

Sleipnir really differentiates itself with its interface. Contrary to Chrome, Sleipnir de-emphasizes the URL bar, making it a small button in the titlebar. Clicking it slides the URL bar out to fill the titlebar, which is pretty slick. Since most people find websites via search rather than entering the URL, de-emphasizing the URL bar makes sense. It also allows Sleipnir’s interface to take up significantly less space, as the tab bar can be placed where the URL bar is found in other browsers.

Speaking of the tab bar, it’s easily the most striking aspect of Sleipnir’s interface. As with its iOS counterpart, tabs are displayed with miniature previews instead of traditional text labels in Sleipnir. The current tab is highlighted by a hovering triangle, and inactive tabs are grayed-out. The advantage of this layout is that it doesn’t take up much space, and tabs are easier to pick out, since our brains can recognize images faster than text. The disadvantage, of course, is that it can be harder to tell some websites apart without a label, say if you have several Google searches going, as pictured below.

TiledTab

TiledTab is a tab-grouping feature similar to Firefox’s aptly named Tab Groups, but prettier and more user-friendly. Accessed via a button in the tab bar, it shows your current tabs as previews against the familiar linen background, with groups appearing as color-coded sections at the bottom. You can swipe between groups with a two-finger gesture. The TiledTab button also changes color to reflect which group you’re in, so you don’t feel lost. You don’t have as many options for managing tabs as you do in Firefox’s Tab Groups (you can’t close them, and you’re limited to six groups), but TiledTab makes managing tabs in this way seem like less of a chore.

Bookmarks

Sleipnir also takes a different approach to bookmarks. The Bookmarks window has an “Inbox,” which is where unsorted bookmarks go. To add a bookmark to the bookmarks bar, you simply “ribbon” it. Labels allow you to group bookmarks together by tagging them, and act as folders in the bookmarks bar. You can color-code labels as well. And then there are the actual folders, which perform the same basic function as labels, except they aren’t accessible from the bookmarks bar.

Sleipnir can sync your bookmarks with a service called Fenrir Pass. Setting up an account is easy: Go to Sleipnir’s settings and click the button to create a new account in the Sync tab. Syncing across Mac and iOS works relatively well, but it’s a little confusing, as ribboned bookmarks in Sleipnir for Mac don’t automatically appear in the iOS version’s bookmarks bar.

I’m really excited for the full release of Sleipnir for Mac, and I can’t wait to see the final version. But what do you think of Sleipnir? Do you have room for another Mac browser?

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