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Web Browser: Epic

Browser with an Indian touch

Deepak Ajwani
Published: Aug 10, 2010 06:05:01 AM IST
Updated: Aug 10, 2010 01:00:40 PM IST

 

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)

(This story appears in the 13 August, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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  • Arthur

    i love this software

    on Jan 26, 2011
  • Alok

    Thanks for your support! In terms of "lacking finesse" in the design--the black welcome page screenshot above does certainly lack finesse and that's why we changed it last week, you can see the new one at: epicbrowser.com/welcome.html Thanks and do send us more feedback so we can continue to improve Epic. Everything we've done has been done "totally in India" and we continue to give credit to everyone who's been a part of Epic including Mozilla and Add-on creators which include not just Google Indic (which we modified quite a bit incidentally) but many others--all are listed in Epic under "Help", "About Epic". This is the idea of open source software. According to a commenter, there would likely never be a "new" piece of software created again since every piece of software is built on other software e.g. is Google Chrome also stealing and not a new browser because it uses Webkit, Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, and much much more open source software? We thank tremendously everyone who's been a part of Epic including Mozilla, Add-On Developers and our own team and we'll keep delivering an out-of-the-box browsing experience that is more "Indian", more secure, more private and more productive. For more customization, addons.mozilla.org is the spot or the Epic Apps sidebar where you can install 1500 sidebars into Epic. Alok, Founder and CEO Hidden Reflex

    on Aug 10, 2010
  • Rohit

    Epic claims this to be built "totally in India", but anybody who has used firefox and has installed well known add-on's will know that this browser "Epic" is nothing but "Epic stealing" .. or in more modest terms, "bundling" of pretty well known Firefox add-ons with Firefox itself. Nothing more. So this "pride" of "Indian product" is a lie and I guess people will come to know about this sooner or later. Just to add: Their multi-language input is from "google indic" addon for firefox. Their chrome like look also comes from an addon. Just search for them, it's all there at addon.mozilla.org ... for you to make your browser much more customized than this bloated piece of Epic!

    on Aug 10, 2010