Since Windows 10 was released back in July last year, the world of web browsers has grown equitably interesting. Edge is giving a tough competition to Chrome and Firefox on the forefront while there is another battle ongoing in rear between various lightweight web browsers. An extensive web surfer always intends to chose the best and ideal browser to take advantage of diverse set of features provided. On the other hand, lightweight browsers sacrifices some of the features in order to take the edge off eating up your system resources. These can also be useful for saving up substantial amount of memory.
Today, we are going to review Blueflap, a fantastic browser with smooth and minimalist design. This is a lightweight web browser which is built for Windows 10 using UWP standards, brought to you by some passionate developers in France. Below is a rundown on various features and quirks of this browser:
Introduction
Blueflap is the first Web Browser which is Made in France. It is almost fully translated to English with a slight tinge of French here and there. Also, it is currently available for some other languages as well (hu-HU/es-ES/zh-SG/de-DE/pt-BR).
Blueflap version 0.8 was created in August 2013 with very basic set of capabilities. In June 2014, after putting into rigorous amount of effort by the development team, version 3.0.1 was released with an enhanced implementation using Awesomium. Adding to its potential, Blueflap 3.2 was released in October 2014. When Windows 10 was released, the team realized the potential of its UWP platform and decided to build an universal app which could run on both Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile. An all-new, sleek and minimal browser was thus created which is still in Beta stage. Current version of Blueflap is 5.2016.522.0 which was released on 22nd May 2016. Concerned team is still working on various bug fixes and performance improvements before it is ready to be your default browser.
Design
Blueflap introduces an all new appealing look and feel. It has been re-designed with keeping coherence to the touch screen standards. The browser exhibits an impressive design with smooth navigation experience, on phone as well as PC. Page loading speed is also good depending on the network connection. It comes with an ability to configure your browser landing page using Bluestart which gives you a swift access to Blueflap’s exclusive features.
Features
Indeed, Blueflap has an elegant design, with some pretty cool features into the bargain. Below is the feature outline for this browser:
1. Password Protection: This particular feature sets it one step ahead of its competitors. You can use this feature to protect your browser with a master password that is asked every time you launch the browser.
Gone are the days when you would be dubious to hand over your phone or PC to your friend worrying about your browsing history. Blueflap takes care of it all with an extra layer of security.
2. Memos Tab: This particular feature provides a prompt note taking benefit. You can save any information about a site, be it URL or any links inside it. It proves to be quite useful to store notes at ease. It’s an extra plus over the bookmarks tab and notification hub which is also available in the browser. History and contextual notifications are also maintained in Blueflap.
3. Search Fight: Blueflap has a long list of search engines available to execute specific web searches. You can also choose the Search engine of your like to set as default. But the cherry on the cake is Search Fight. When using this feature, it splits up the screen in two halves. You can select the custom search engines for each side and then hit a search query to display the results on both sides at one go. This is quite interesting when you want to see which engine is more competent and delivers efficient and useful content.
4. Personalization: Blueflaps gives you a power of making the browser fully YOURS. There is Bluestart using which you can customize how your homepage looks. You can choose from a wide variety of available wallpapers to change the ambience. Additionally, you can also provide an image URL to set a custom wallpaper.
Apart from this, you can also select a custom color for the browser. There is a color palette present in settings page using which you can select the color of your choice and also calibrate it using a RGB slider. Having said that, what people would specifically love is that there is also a dark mode option available to keep your system wide settings in unison.
Furthermore, there are few other minimal but useful features as well. You can share the webpages from inside the browser using Windows’ share functionality. You can turn off certain features like Contextual Notifications, Search Fight, Smart Suggest, Favorites etc. Apart from this, you can also contribute towards improving the browser experience by translating it to other languages.
Final Thoughts
Nevertheless, Blueflap is still in beta and it can really improve a lot on its feature set as well as general user experience but the amount of dedication put into it shows upfront with an attractive look and distinctive features. This really makes it worth a shot.
If you want to get in touch with its developers or want to report an issue, you can follow Blueflap on twitter here.
You can try it out by downloading from Microsoft Store here.
