Five of the best mobile browsers

With 2008 bearing witness to both a mobile broadband boom and a proliferation of iPhone-esque devices hitting the market, suddenly surfing the web on your phone has never been more popular.

Here, silicon.com rounds up five of the best offerings out there and not an IE in sight...

Opera Mini

Java-ME-based browser made by Norwegian outfit Opera Software. Self-billed as "the world's most popular mobile web browser" the company claims to have more than 20 million users - and unlike its other mobile browser, Opera Mobile, it's free to download. It offers speedy surfing as the browser requests web pages through Opera's servers and then sends compressed and processed data to the mobile user - speeding up the time it takes to load the sites. Opera Mini 4.2 - the latest release - has also been ported to Google Android, although there's no such luck for iPhone owners.

Features

• Impressive website download speeds owing to use of proxy servers
• Dynamic reformatting technology means website text fits onto small mobile screens - avoiding the need for horizontal scrolling to finish reading sentences
• Support for landscape browsing

Lacks

• Flash support or streaming video
• Cut and paste

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