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DATE:18-July-2008
Filed Under: Portable Applications, USB Devices

I forgot my USB drive the other day, the one that I carry my portable applications on. Luckily, I had a couple of SD cards and my card reader with me. I carry a suite of diagnostic tools on a 128MB card and "Floppy Office" on a 16MB. I haven't used this device for some time, but I was happy to have it with me today. Because of its storage capability I cannot carry all the applications that need, but it does have the essentials including kPad a RTF file editor, which is what I used to write this Blog. However, that got me thinking again about pint-sized browsers. I don’t have a browser on this device and although I love Firefox, Firefox is not going to fit on a 16MB card.

Although performing a search produced several candidates the determining factors for my choice for a pint-sized browser includes program size and its overall functionality.

The three candidates I came up with:

Avant uses Firefox browsing history, weighs’ in at 3.1MB and is reminiscent of Apples Safari browser. If you haven’t heard there is now Windows version of Safari. 3.1MB isn't all that bad a size for a portable browser; Firefox is about 24MB.

The Crazy Browser uses the Internet Explorer engine and has the same feel of IE; Crazy Browser uses many of the same toolbar buttons as IE. Crazy Browser is the smallest portable browser I have reviewed to date, it weighs in at 475KB, and loads pages quickly.

GreenBrowser is nicely designed browser,weighs in at 3MB, and is dependent on IE, but the browser loaded pages slowly, produced Chinese ideograms on a page of search hits which was a bit overwhelming. Seeing them there just made the page seem too busy.

And the Winner Is

The GreenBrowser is out because of its slow page loads. Although I appreciated Avant's functionality and its sleek look, wanting to leave room for file storage, the 3.1MB size is a bit too large for the 16MB card.  The winning candidate is the Crazy Browser. The Crazy Browser functions nicely and like I mentioned its size is perfect for a 16MB device.