Dolphin Browser for iPad Review

If you're looking to browse more swimmingly on your iPad, you needn't look any farther than Dolphin. Though some things that make it our browser Editors' Choice Android browser are missing from the iPad version, Dolphin for iPad offers a great selection of features that enhance your Web browsing, such as extensive gesture support, full screen view, and syncing. But you'll lose some JavaScript performance, since Apple only allows JavaScript acceleration for its own Safari browser. Apple limitations also mean that you won't get Adobe Flash support on the iPad. But let's take a little tour of all the clever stuff you do get in Dolphin.

Interface
When you first open Dolphin, you'll see its Speed Dial and Webzine (more on that in a moment), the same page you'll see whenever you open a new empty tab. Like that pioneered in Opera, Speed dial is simply a grid of links you want accessible all the time that shows up whenever you open a new tab. Another feature that's immediately apparent is the full-screen button in the upper left corner. This option, matched only by Mercury (another iPad browser), is really helpful, given the tablet's limited screen area compared with a computer's. As we'll see in a bit, this option ties in well with Dolphin's gesture support.

Tab implementation. Tapping a clear, big Plus sign button at top right adds a new tab. You can scroll tabs back and forth if you add more than can fit along the top of the browser, but you can't drag tabs to change their position as you can in Safari and Google Chrome for iPad. Nor do you see the X that lets you close a tab for any but the active tab—Chrome and Mercury have an edge in this regard. Only the Opera Mini and Yahoo Axis for iPad apps actually take an approach completely different from the customary desktop-style tabs, using larger tiles, but swiping in from the right in Dolphin shows larger tiles for each tab arranged vertically, making closing or reloading easier on your finger dexterity than the desktop-style tabs at the top. Likewise, swiping in from the left shows all your bookmarks.

New tabs and Webzines. What does happen when you hit that Plus sign to create a new tab in Dolphin? Something pretty unique. Well, maybe not as unique as Opera's Speed Dial apps, but to the standard popular and favorite links choices that many browsers display on their new-tab page, Dolphin adds "Webzines." These will format any site as an iPad magazine, laying out several articles in an asymmetrical four-panel layout, not unlike you'd see in the New York Times iPad app. You can swipe right-to-left to page over to more articles. Clicking on a headline fills the screen with the first three lines of the article and a link to it on the site. Missing, though, are photos for the article entries. It's a clever idea, but you're probably better off just bookmarking the actual sites.

Customization is not a strong suit for Dolphin: Unlike Mercury or Dolphin's own Android version, there's no theme capability in Dolphin for iPad, so you're stuck with the stock green border. A final necessary capability for any Safari replacement is the ability to demand the desktop version of sites. I'm happy to report that Dolphin settings include this capability, which prevents you from having dumbed-down mobile sites appear on the ample iPad screen. But you do lose Safari (and Maxthon and Mercury's) reading view, which cleans up your view of online publications by just showing the main text.

Gestures
Gestures are a natural on a touch tablet like the iPad, and using them in combination with Dophin's full-screen mode makes for a powerful one-two interface punch. To start entering a gesture, just tap the finger icon and finger-paint away. The simplest and most common type of gesture is writing a letter of the alphabet, so you needn't look like a baseball manager signaling for a stolen base to use gestures.

Dolphin come preloaded with seven useful preset gestures for things like going to the top and bottom of the page, opening a new tab, searching, and visiting popular sites like Facebook and Twitter. But a lot of the power of these gestures comes from the fact that you can create your own gestures. By contrast, Mercury only can handle eight gestures, and Chrome has no gesture support at all. There are 20 actions you can add gestures for, including actions like opening a frequently visited site, browsing back or forward, closing the current tab, bookmarking a page, toggling full-screen mode, and opening the download window.

Syncing, Security, Performance

Syncing
With Dolphin Connect, you can sync your bookmarks, but since there's no Dolphin browser for the desktop, you'll only be able to sync among your mobile devices. And you can only sync bookmarks: Chrome, Mercury, and Maxthon for iPad can all sync with a desktop browser, and they let you sync more, including tabs and password logins.

Security and Privacy
Like all the major iPad browsers, Dolphin offers a private mode from the settings menu. This will prevent anyone using the iPad after you from seeing your browsing and search history. But unfortunately, like all other current iPad browsers, there's no support for Do Not Track, which tells third-party websites not to create a marketing profile on you based on your browsing activity.

For more general security, I did a rudimentary check using Browserscope's security tests. On this measure, Dolphin tied all comers save Chrome, which fails fewer of the 17 tests, whereas the rest all fail three. Chrome somehow passes the Strict Transport Security test where the others fail. I also tested a few of the know malware distributing domains from malwaredomains.com, but I couldn't find any that Dolphin blocked. A few that Firefox reported as a "Reported Attack Page!" was let through by Dolphin. But keep in mind, such sites aren't as dangerous on the iPad as they are on a PC, since it's unlikely they could install malware programs. And none of the other iPad browsers blocked the malware-distributing site.

Performance
Due to restrictive decisions on Apple's part, Dolphin is not as fast as the built-in Safari browser in some Web operations. All third-party browser apps are forced to use Safari's underlying WebKit engine to render websites, yet they don't get the accelerated JavaScript performance Safari enjoys. So if you're going to an app-like site, your best bet is still the built-in Safari browser. There isn't much point benchmarking, aside from the chance to demonstrate this fact. Nonetheless, below are my results for Chrome, Maxthon, Safari, and Dolphin on one of the better-known browser benchmarks, Sunspider. I ran it on an iPad 3 with 16GB memory:

The more than threefold improvement shows that the built-in Safari browser has an indisputable advantage when it comes to JavaScript performance, and therefore Web application performance. But for kicks, I ran one of Microsoft's tests of hardware acceleration, the Particle Acceleration test. On a desktop, a well-accelerated browser should get a result of 60 frames per second.

Dolphin is tied for last place here, but none of the browsers shows great hardware acceleration performance: Optimally you should see a rate of close to 60FPS.

Compatibility
Just out of curiosity, I ran the iPad HTML5Test.com to see if there was any difference in HTML5 support among the iPad browsing apps. The test is out of 500, with points assigned for each set of HTML5 capabilities. It also reports "bonus points" for features that are not technically part of the HTML5 spec or draft, but that are good to have for full-featured Web browsers. Here are my recorded results:

Yep, they're all the same. If you still didn't believe that there was only one browser engine for iOS, maybe this finally convinces you. And this score is nothing to sneeze at, though it falls short of Chrome on the desktop's 437 and 13 bonus points. What all this means is that Dolphin will be exactly as compatible with websites as Safari is, which is pretty good.

Browsing with the Dolphins
The most extensive support for gesture input, a useful full-screen view, and its Webzine site presentation stand out as what Dolphin can add to your iPad browsing experience. And those are no little things—full screen and gestures alone are reasons to install and use this Safari replacement. You won't get as much speed on app-like sites as you would with the built-in Safari browser, but that holds for any non-Safari browser on the iPad. You'll also lose Safari's reading view, but you will be able to force full desktop Web viewing as opposed to mobile versions of sites. In all, there are good reasons to browse with Dolphin, but Mercury also offers full screen, gestures, and desktop view and adds syncing with Firefox and interface customization using themes.

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