Web Browser: Epic

Epic calls itself India’s first browser. It’s built on the open-source Mozilla platform, but otherwise truly Indian: It is a creation of a team of Indian engineers at Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore-based software company founded by Alok Bhardwaj in 2007. And yes, it has an Indian touch to it from the word go: A logo inspired by the Indian tricolour, India-centric skins, themes and wallpapers, you name it.

But that’s not all. It overflows with features and applications readily available as widgets. You have simple social networking tools; so you can log into Twitter, or Facebook and schmooze with pals in a sidebar while ‘working’ in the main pane. There’s tabs for Web email; Gmail and Yahoo are supported. Another app lets you browse for files on your computer. It also has inbuilt antivirus capability, scanning for real time threats while you’re browsing the Internet.

More India-specific functions: Epic Write, the inbuilt word processor gives you all the functionality of an MS Word plus support for 12 Indian languages, even letting you transliterate (i.e., type in Roman, and the software automatically changes your text to a pre-selected Indic script). And there’s an app that puts various chunks of India-related online content on tap: Indian news sites (current affairs, business, state-wise news sites, stock markets, sports, etc), and live TV news (NDTV24x7, NDTV India, NDTV Profit).

Overall, this is a feature-packed, amazingly fast browser. You can increase functionality with standard Mozilla plug-ins. But, like many Indian products across the board, it is very, very useful but lacks finesse in its design. For the average Indian Web surfer who is yet to upgrade from IE 6, this might be overkill. But for anyone who likes multiple tabs and multi-functionalism, it’s worth giving a shot.

Free download from epicbrowser.com
(MS Windows only)