The race for the best and the fastest web-browsers never end, whether it’s the desktop version or mobile. In the past, we have covered two such mobile web-browsers, the infamous Opera Mini which was and is still the most popular mobile web-browser and Bolt.

When Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile web-browser for S60 devices, is just round the corner (or atleast we think that), we have a new contender to be the fastest browser. o3 – Ozone Browser, is a webkit-based browser with a very fast interface and nice features.

The S60 version was recently released which is still in its Alpha stage with a few glitches, but is quite stable and usable. It has several interesting features like multiple windows, slick zoom in/out, bookmarks management, popup blocker and much more. It also has advanced web technologies like high performance disk caching, Ajax, Javascript and HTML5 support, fast image decoding etc.

The interface is fast, but still needs a lot of polishing. Looks quite ugly in the current release. It uses very low memory, that means cell phones with 64MB of RAM can also run this. Since it is a direct-browser, which means it does not pass requests through a central server to reformat the pages. Ofcourse, that makes it slow but it is more safer than proxy-based browsers. O3 is slower than Opera Mini, but definitely faster than the native S60 browser based on webkit.

Features, that make this browser worthy of a try:

• Multiple windows
• Zooming and panning
• Website compatibility and rendering
• Ajax and Javascript Support
• Offline web apps support

Google assumes this browser to be iPhone because of the user agent it sends, so all Google services with iPhone-versions can be accessed with this browser on a S60 device! Some Google services with iPhone-enhanced interface includes Gmail, Reader, News etc.

Screenshots

Download Ozone O3 Browser

Ozone Browser can be downloaded for both S60 3rd Edition (FP1 and FP2) and UIQ devices. You can download it from here: Download Ozone Browser.