A Review of TheWorld Browser v3.1

TechGeek is as kind as to send me a link to TheWorld browser, a relatively unknown browser if compared to the other leading browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. I heard of this browser before, but never did really test it, nor did I realize that it has released their latest 3rd version to public (the previous version I know is v2). So here am I, writing a review on it.

Is it another Internet Explorer?



The simple answer is no.

There are detailed narration of TheWorld Browser on their official website so I’m not going to list down everything here, but do take some of these important notes about TheWorld Browser v3. It is essentially a browser utilizing the same browsing engine as Internet Explorer, which we called it Trident. In contrast with IE however, it is designed to be lightweight, full-featured and highly customizable with add-ons and plugins. So in other words, it may use the same web rendering engine and some popular features, but you can expect it to be BETTER than IE.

How is its features compared to IE, then?

Installation is fast and simple. When the browser is launched, it brings us to the homepage. Although the GUI layout does not have frames, it is simple and easily navigational and the color is pleasing to the eye. I immediately notice some interesting difference. Firstly the browser’s toolbar is located on the right side of the minimize/maximize button, with an additional button where users can retract the toolbar menu. Pretty cool, actually.

Another extra feature TheWorld Browser had on the table is a tiny yet useful scrolling tool, located just at the right of the tab area. For people who open multiple tabbed windows for browsing, this can come in handy.

Unlike IE, TheWorld Browser can be customized much easier. Like Firefox and most recently Chrome, the browser has its own dedicated plugin and addon website where users can easily browse and install the plugins they want. Its library is much lesser than those of Firefox but still, it’s pretty impressive considering that IE didn’t even have such a library.

TheWorld Browser also has its own download manager, which is also configurable.  In fact, I can see that some of the options are not available on other browsers, which makes it really unique.

If the above features are what TheWorld Browser has and IE doesn’t have, then take a look at some of the features that TheWorld browser already shared with IE. Both have InPrivate browsing (heck, even the name’s the same!), both has jumplist for Windows Superbar and both share the same Internet Settings Options. Whatever IE’s got, TheWorld browser got too!

I wonder if anyone would immediately dump IE after this feature review…

Is it fast and performs well?

To judge its overall experience together with resources usage, I pulled out the old faithful: Windows Task Manager and do a little homework. Here’s TheWorld Browser’s performance in idle mode (when browser is minimized/in the background):

It runs in two separate processes, just as what you would’ve expect IE to, but in comparison to IE, its resources usage during idle is more lighter.

How about when it is active and running in foreground? Here’s its resources usage when I started browsing:

Still a pretty normal performance. There’s almost no impact at all.

Then how about when it is loading pages? Here’s its resources usage when I started loading a page: 

It is pretty harsh on CPU; CPU usage spiked up to 50 cycles which turns me off slightly; memory also spiked up to 40000K on one of the processes, which I believe is GUI or network-related process.

Although TheWorld browser can be quite CPU-hungry, I still think this performance is worthy of praise; well, I’m a Firefox fan and I’ve seen Firefox performing a lot worse than that, particularly the memory leak issue. IE performed even worse than that! I would say TheWorld browser is still slightly slower than Firefox in terms of browsing speed, but it is a way ahead of IE (even with the same rendering engine). 

Is it stable?

I did not encounter any unusual issue when using TheWorld, but it doesn’t mean that it is hang-proof. I spammed the toolbar-minimizer button while a page was loading and guess what, it actually hangs on me!

Although it recovered to normal after waiting a while, I would say TheWord browser may still need to get some bugs and performance issue sorted out…

Conclusion:

There are many alternative, less-popular browsers I would recommend to people, notably the latest Maxthon v3 Beta and Flock, but TheWorld browser is yet another good alternative I would suggest, especially those wanting to replace IE in particular. TheWorld browser runs on Windows 2000 onwards, making it a pretty compatible browser. If there is a five-star rating on this browser, I’d probably give it a four.

Visit TheWorld Browser v3 Official Site.