Our Current Browser: UC

App In Focus is our new segment which will focus on great mobile applications that we constantly use on our smartphones or that we manage to discover. To kick things off we’d like to share with you guys the browser that we’ve been using on our Android smartphone lately — UC Browser. We decided to leave Chrome mainly because we didn’t like their implementation of the tabs for the pages (bundled with all other apps). (Ed. Note: changing Chrome to remove the bundling can be done via Settings, apologies for the oversight!)

So what’s UC Browser? It’s a free download from Google Play and it was founded in 2004. It’s available in more than 150 countries and they’re a business under the Alibaba Group. What makes it special? For us it does three things exceptionally well: user interface, features, and download speeds.

UC Browser is very intuitive and easy to navigate. There’s a slight loading time when you fire it up for the first time but after that you get to the app home screen. There’s the URL/Search bar at the top while your bookmarks and favorite sites are displayed below. Control panel is at the very bottom.

Accessing the Settings will open up a lot of customization options. You can change how multiple pages appear to either cards or list. You can change the theme from regular (light) to night time. You can also enable Ad Blocker and a bunch of other features/add-ons.

In terms of optimization and downloads, the UC Browser uses data compression and cloud acceleration which saves data consumption and speeds up web page loading. This was very noticeable for us as we often using our smartphone to browse through websites.

So far we’re loving UC Browser. We might give others a try as well but for now we’ll stick to this one first and we recommend that you guys check it out for yourselves by getting it from the Google Play Store.