Life is an alternative web browser for iPad I reviewed back in June. The app was quite nice, but I ended up uninstalling it due to its numerous bugs. The feature set was interesting, though:
Life Web Browser tries a different approach, and it does so by telling us that we don’t need tabs and pages, we need to swipe.
Aseid Ghaffari and his team found out that users don’t find Safari’s behavior with new links exactly comfortable. Apple’s Safari forces you to go back and forth between a dashboard with thumbnails of pages, and another take on the subject such as iCab’s desktop-like tabs didn’t impress Ghaffari either. If it’s not about copying the desktop and it’s not about changing pages, then it definitely must be about gestures – the developers thought. So there you have it, you horizontally swipe between “windows”.
The latest 1.5 update, approved and released a few days ago, introduces iPhone support (the app is now Universal) and a couple of new options such as “Open sites” and pull to refresh for webpages. What, really?
Yeah, that pull-to-refresh. While it certainly is a quick way to refresh a page and see updated contents, I’m not exactly sure how the overly popular gesture can work for websites. I mean, a website is a not a timeline. It’s not a list of some sorts either, so to me it seems like some users asked “Hey, pull to refresh would be awesome!!” and the developers ran to implement that. I don’t know, but it just doesn’t feel right.
Open Sites is nice: you hit a button and you get a bar with thumbnails for open pages - it reminds me of Apple’s default task switcher. On the iPhone, you get a mini version of the app with all the same features of the iPad counterpart - swiping between pages included. Now that we’re on it: animations are faster and fluid now, the engineers behind Life definitely worked hard to improve the reliability of the app. There are still some minor bugs here and there, but I have to say Life 1.5 feels better than the first versions.
Life Web Browser is available at $2.99 as Universal app, and you can purchase an iPhone-only version at $0.99. If you’re looking for an interesting and (again) promising alternative to Safari, give it a try.
