Wednesday, March 1, 2017

The only acceptable browser for Android: Yandex

Since I upgraded my Nexus 6 to the latest OS 7.1.1, I have been searching for a browser that does these two simple things:

1) Text wrapping (text-reflow, auto-fit)
2) Remember passwords

Without text wrapping, I don't know how anybody could read anything on the phone's small screen. As for password-remember, it is virtually impossible for anyone to type in passwords over and over again on the phone's tiny keyboard.


Yandex and Opera are the only two can do these two simple things, believe it or not. I didn't try FireFox and Chrome though, because they suck, they use too much resources and run phone hot. I pick Yandex over Opera, because it is quite a hassle to use tabs with Opera and it sometimes drains battery while phone is idling.


Yandex has some very thoughtful features too. For example, address bar is at the bottom, as you see in above first photo. It is auto-hidden, and, the best part, I only need to move the page down just a little bit to let it appear. Because it is based on the same source code of Chrome, so all Chrome and Opera extensions work with Yandex! I use the Autofill extension to remember the few passwords that Yandex won't. Yes, all, I mean ALL, passwords can be remembered! So this Yandex really works for everything you do on a desktop computer! You can even block Youtube ads with one of such extensions!


I cannot say enough how great Yandex is. I do have one complaint: cannot disable the stupid preview mode; so have to double touch for each and every site. Apple invented two great things that ruined user experience on every smartphone: one is swipe to answer a call and the other is this preview mode.

The followings are the ones I tried but could not do at least one of the above two simple things:

Boat
Dolphin
Next
Naked
Via
UC (text is often messily formatted)
Maxthon
Flynx
Ghostery
Lightning

There might be even more, but I can no longer remember.

PS: There are few sites that Autofill cannot automatically add their username and password. "reg.usps.com" is one of them, but can be easily added manually:

9 comments:

  1. Seems to be a great browser. Can it play Youtube with screen off? This is the only function that leads me to Firefox.

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    1. Yes I do use Yandex to listen to YouTube, but I use Blackr to achieve it. This way, not only Yandex, all video players can play while screen off. Blackr has been working so well, I did not check deeply whether Yandex can do it by itself.

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    3. It would be nice if it can be achieved within Yandex, one less app to install. I also like the reading mode in Firefox.

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    4. Yandex also has a reader mode.

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    5. Please let me know how to bring up reader mode. I don't seem to be able to find it.

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    6. Touch the icon with an "A" in it at the address bar.

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  3. Excellent article. I am facing many of these issues as well..

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