14 DAY TRIAL // iOS developer Diigo has contacted Softpedia with news that an alternative to the Chrome web browser is now available for iPad users. As Diigo puts it, iChromy is a Chrome-style web browser that brings “the best of Chrome's interface and speed to the iPad."
According to its makers, iChromy provides a great browser alternative for iPad users. Diigo tells us “Chrome lovers should feel right at home when they use iChromy.”
The reason lies in the key features which include tabs on top, omnibox, offline reading, extra screen space when scrolling, the ability to quickly share content on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapper and, of course, the Diigo cloud, the ability to search from the context menu directly and to open links in new tabs by long-pressing.
One feature that clearly stands out is “reading list,” which not only bears an eyeglasses icon just like the Mac OS X Lion version of Safari, it also bears the same dubbing as the offline reading list in Apple’s own web browser.
Diigo likely slipped this one past Apple’s net, but there’s also an offset chance the App Store Review board saw nothing wrong with a feature that comes pretty much standard with thousands of applications, desktop and mobile.
“In addition to features, we have made a great deal of effort to make iChromy fast,” the developer told us.
Diigo says that tabbed browsers are often slow and prone to crash due to the memory issue, but “iChromy reloads tabs dynamically and smartly, so it feels fast even with multiple tabs.”
We put Diigo’s claims to the test but we didn’t get any blazing fast results even on the strongest WiFi signal on our first generation iPad (WiFi only).
That’s not to say iChromy is slow, but we still hold Opera Mini 6 as the fastest of the lot (which includes Apple’s own Safari).
Diigo also said that future releases of iChromy will include a lot more enhancements, plus integration of highlighter and annotation features, unique core services by the developer.