Mercury Web Browser Pro (for iPad)

Mozilla has , Firefox Home, which allowed syncing of bookmarks, history, passwords, tabs and more between your desktop Firefox browser and your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. But not to worry! Mercury gives you syncing, and a wealth of nifty tablet browsing tricks all its own, including full-screen webpage view and gesture support. Unlike most iOS browsers, Mercury comes in both a free and 99 cent Pro version, which adds the Firefox syncing, Dropbox integration, and printing capability.

Interface
Mercury sports the traditional desktop-style tabs along the top of the app, surmounted by standard toolbar buttons—back and forward, home, favorite along the left, and settings, share, and full screen along the right. Separate address and search bars will be welcomed by those who prefer to compartmentalize those two activities. Competing (3.5 stars) and (3.0 stars) iPad browsers use a single box for both activities and with iOS 6, Safari will too, but Maxthon and Opera Miniboth use two separate boxes.

Tab implementation is pretty good, though you won't find a new twist on touchscreen tabs as you do in (3.5 stars) and Opera Mini. You can open up to ten tabs, compared with Safari's nine and Chrome and Maxthon's unlimited tabs. Dolphin tells you that performance will suffer if you open more than nine, which is probably good advice for anyone browsing on an iPad. An X in every Mercury tab means you can close any of them at any time without having to switch to the tab you want to close as you do with Dolphin and Maxthon. But you can't drag them to change their positions on the tab bar as you can in Chrome and Safari. In one nice tab-and-navigation help, you can hold down a link to open its page in a new tab, but Safari and Dolphin do this too.

Full-screen browsing is a big plus over the stock iPad browser and over Chrome and all other third-party browsers I've tested save Dolphin. This could change with iOS 6, though it's not clear that full screen will be supported on the iPad as well as on the iPhone. When you switch to full-screen view in Mercury, you get small overlay controls along the bottom, for back and forward, entering a new address, returning to standard view, and a circular control. This last looks like a TV remote control, with an Enter symbol in the middle. It's an interface innovation that lets you access pretty much everything you could with the browser's main, non-full-screen toolbar.

The pièce de résistance of Mercury's interface is its theming capability. None of the alternative iPad browsers I've tested—including Chrome, Dolphin, Maxthon—offered this window-dressing capability, even though their desktop counterparts did. I could choose from 11 options, from Christmas to Yakuza. One of the two wood-grain themes fit my sensibilities perfectly.

Gestures
Gestures are darned handy when you're viewing pages in full-screen, and Mercury offers eight of these, including those for tab switching, navigation, and moving to the top and bottom of a page. You can customize what action happens for any of these gestures from a choice of 19, but you can't create new gestures as you can in Dolphin. You're limited to the eight, while Dolphin doesn't have a limit, and lets you program 20 actions with gestures. But where Dolphin's gestures really top those in Mercury is that they let you create gestures to visit specific websites.

Extra Browsing Helpers
Like Safari and Maxthon, Mercury offers a Readability mode, hiding all but the main text and images of a Web article. When I tried this on PCMag.com's Hands on With the iPhone 5 article, I saw extraneous text at the end. I also prefer how Safari and Maxthon make the reading mode available via a button in the address bar, instead of Mercury's menu choice. Getting back to regular Web view was also easier in the others.

Like most alternative iPad browsers, Mercury lets you tell sites to show their full desktop version, rather than a dumbed-down mobile version. I do like how Mercury actually lets you tell sites you're one of 10 different specific browsers—IE 6 through 8, Chrome, Firefox, or Opera, for example. This means a site that displays correctly in IE but not in Safari will think you're using IE, so you get the correct webpage, but the setting is too buried compared with similar features in Chrome.

A couple things you won't find in Chrome or Safari, however, Mercury's Ad Blocker and dimmer features. The ad blocker spared me from having to see most third-party banner ads, and the dimmer is simply a brightness control that's more accessible than the one in the iPad Settings app.

Other hard-to-find features in Mercury are its download and file managers. You can hold your finger against a link on a Web page, and choose Download Link from the resulting menu. The file is downloaded to the iPad, where you may not be able to do anything with it. Not to worry: The browser comes with a viewer, and if that doesn't work, you can transfer the file to your PC using iTunes. Even better, you can upload the file to your Dropbox folder from a simple sharing button. But don't be deceived into thinking this is as snappy a procedure as it is on a desktop.

Syncing and Bookmarklets
When I started Mercury's Firefox syncing feature, it looked just like a mobile version of Firefox. It generated a passcode that I could enter into Firefox running on my PC. But I could also just log into my Firefox syncing account and enter the security passcode (long though it is). After I did this, I immediately saw all my bookmark links, but unfortunately, my open tabs weren't synced, as they are when you sync on an Android browser.

But there's more! Mercury's bookmarklets are like tiny JavaScript applications with specific single purposes. For example, one opens a dialog box asking for a UPS tracking number; enter the number, and you'll be taken directly to your package's details. Another shows all images on a page, and another will look up a word for you in and online dictionary. Devilishly useful little devils, these bookmarklets! Note: These are far from being a new concept, and they can work in any browser, but Mercury makes useful ones easy to find and install.

Performance
Mercury is the Roman god known for speed, but as with all iPad replacement browsers, there's no boost over the stock Safari browser. Quite the opposite, in fact, since Apple doesn't let competing browsers use a JavaScript accelerator like its own Nitro. All third-party browser apps are forced to use Safari's underlying WebKit engine to render websites. So if you're going to an app-like site, your best bet is still the built-in Safari browser. There isn't much point benchmarking, aside from the chance to demonstrate this fact. Nonetheless, below are my results for Chrome, Maxthon, Mercury, Safari, and Dolphin on one of the better-known browser benchmarks, Sunspider. I ran it on an iPad 3 with 16GB memory:

Sunspider 0.91	Time in ms (lower is better)
Safari	1838
Mercury	7174
Chrome	7257
Dolphin	7284
Maxthon	7376

The more than threefold improvement shows that the built-in Safari browser has an indisputable advantage when it comes to JavaScript performance, and therefore Web application performance. But for kicks, I ran one of Microsoft's tests of hardware acceleration, the Particle Acceleration test. On a desktop, a well-accelerated browser should get a result of 60 frames per second.

IETestdrive.com Particle Acceleration	FPS (higher is better)	Score (higher is better)
Safari	11	11004
Chrome	9	8991
Mercury	8	7983
Dolphin	7	6992
Maxthon	7	6997

Mercury is right in the middle here, but none of the browsers shows great hardware acceleration performance: Optimally you should see a rate of close to 60FPS.

Compatibility
Just out of curiosity, I ran the iPad HTML5Test.com to see if there was any difference in HTML5 support among the iPad browsing apps. The test is out of maximum score of 500, with points assigned for each set of HTML5 capabilities. It also reports "bonus points" for features that are not technically part of the HTML5 spec or draft, but that are good to have for full-featured Web browsers. Here are my recorded results:

HTML5Test.com	Score (out of 500)	Bonus points
Chrome	324	9
Dolphin	324	9
Maxthon	324	9
Mercury	324	9
Safari	324	9

Yep, they're all exactly the same. If you still didn't believe that there was only one browser engine for iOS, maybe this finally convinces you. And this score is nothing to sneeze at, though it falls short of Chrome on the desktop's 437 and 13 bonus points. What all this means is that Dolphin will be exactly as compatible with websites as Safari is, which is pretty good.

Security
Like all the major iPad browsers, Mercury offers a private mode from its settings menu. This will prevent anyone using the iPad after you from seeing your browsing and search history. But unfortunately, like all other current iPad browsers, there's no support for Do Not Track, which tells third-party websites not to create a marketing profile on you based on your browsing activity.

For more general security, I did a rudimentary check using Browserscope's security tests. On this measure, Mercury tied all comers save Chrome, which fails fewer of the 17 tests, whereas the rest all fail three. Chrome somehow passes the Strict Transport Security test where the others fail.

I also tested a few of the known malware distributing domains from malwaredomains.com, but I couldn't find any that Mercury blocked. A few that Firefox reported as a "Reported Attack Page!" was let through by Dolphin. But keep in mind, such sites aren't as dangerous on the iPad as they are on a PC, since it's unlikely they could install malware programs. And none of the other iPad browsers blocked the malware-distributing site, either.

Mecury Is Shiny and Fluid
With its plethora of browsing helps—like full-screen view, gestures, desktop site viewing, a download manager—ability to sync with Firefox Mercury, themes, and helpful bookmarklet selection, Mecury bests every other iPad replacement browser I tested, including the much-vaunted Chrome for iPad. Like that and all other alternative browsers, you don't get better speed than that of the built-in Safari, but what you do get is well worth the 99 cents you'll pay to install Mercury Pro, our iPad browser Editors' Choice, and if you can live without the syncing and a couple more features, the free version is just as good.