Sleipnir: Customizable web browser uses IE or Firefox rendering engines

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Freeware, Browsers

Sleipnir: Customizable web browser uses IE or Firefox rendering engines

by Brad Linder Jul 23rd 2008

Sleipnir is a web browser that's popular in Japan and pretty much unheard of in the rest of the world. The Windows-only browser lets users choose between the rendering engines used by market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox. But Sleipnir is more than just a pretty front end for either browser. It's a standalone tool that provides users with a huge number of customization options.

Fenrir, the company behind the free browser, has been making an English language version for a while now, but Computer World reports that the company is stepping up its efforts to promote the browser outside of Japan.

Here are a few of the things that make Sleipnir worth checking out:

If you install the optional Gecko plugin, you can switch between the Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with the click of a button. You can do something similar with the IETab add-on for Firefox, but Sleipnir includes this functionality out of the box.
When you select text, a box shows up on screen letting you search for that text on the web or translate the text from English to Japanese and vice versa. You can even plot a highlighted address on a map.
You can extend the browser's functionality with scripts and plugins.

There's also a portable version of Sleipnir that you can run from a flash drive.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Tags: fenrir, gecko, rendering-engine, sleipnir, trident, web-browsers

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Josh said 3:21PM on 7-23-2008

Popular? Since when is 9% in your own country popular?

Iampriteshdesai said 4:33PM on 7-23-2008

Who cares about another browser? Ff and Opera are miles better. I don't have time for 10 browsers. Stupid story.

Herbert said 6:43PM on 7-23-2008

Not to sound close-minded, but I have to agree with Privesh. I think that Sleipnir does very little that Firefox can't accomplish - a difference negligible enough to make me stay loyal to Firefox.

sodapop said 5:21PM on 7-24-2008

Firefox has a plugin thats lets yur render with IE. This is a waste of programming cpus.

Mikey said 10:32AM on 7-25-2008

I've been having porblems with IE& and FF3 hanging quite a bit, so I tried this. Seems okay, except I couldn't get pages to scroll with my laptop touchpad. So I'm back to FF for the time being. The explorer addon in FF is just fine.

Sydney2K said 4:09AM on 7-30-2008

It's a pity that people are closed minded- there's room for different types of browsers. Sleipnir is an excellent browser alternative, and for people to say there shouldn't be articles about them is, frankly, disappointing. Keep posting articles about these, and ignore the naysayers.

afzal said 9:53AM on 7-30-2008

salam

Laugurinn said 6:39AM on 8-01-2008

How can you diss a product made by a company whose philosophy is this:

Fenrir Inc. wants to meet with Wonderful experience with lots of user via our Software.

Software provides Happiness
Fenrir Inc. think that we can provide Happiness via Software. Our mission is not only offering one of the ways of solving purpose but also able to feel warm interpersonal communication (We define this as one part of happiness.) between developers and Users via Software.

Software meets Design
Fenrir Inc. think not only functions but also a design is one of most important integrants. Functions and a design don't have any meaning if these are singularity however; they have meaning if these grow together in high level. We consider this as one of the necessary requirement for software which provides happiness as a result. Our mission is providing software which delivers on high level integration of functions and design. We act over these two missions. We create environment which allow User, corporate member, our business partner, and Fenrir Inc. to congratulate. Moreover, we chase after the best result without being caught up in consuetude and complex.

asyanon said 8:37AM on 8-04-2008

At first look; Yes, Firefox and Opera appear to be miles ahead of Sleipnir. (These two are my Number One and Number Two favourites, for what it's worth). And Internet Explorer looks to be better than it too (My third favourite).

But to be fair, I had only downloaded the minimum. That means it lacks some of the goodies that might make it better in my eyes.

However, this is not fully my fault. During installation, it tried to download a few other files. The connection got broken. Unfortunately, it does not support "Resume download", and had to start from scratch again. I put up with this three times, and then gave up - Told it to just install whatever it had.

But there are a few things that I like. One of that is the ability to configure quite a number of settings. But then, only an IE user might really be impressed - Those using Firefox and Opera would just laugh, for these two browsers are "SUPER-configurable" and Sleipnir is just "a bit of that" when compared to them.

There's one other BIG problem: If you had set it to start where you had left off (online, with the tabs at different websites, for example) - If you are offline when you launch it the next time, Sleipnir will suck up most of the processing power doing ... I don't know what.

This slows down eveything else, of course. It's just too dumb to tell you that there is no connection available, and leave it at that! That means you'll have to start Task Manager and kill it off.

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