Sleipnir Browser Straddles Firefox & IE Rendering

by Sam Dean - Jul. 28, 2008Comments (6)

After reading an interesting writeup on it on Download Squad, I've been working with an alternative browser that you may very well have never heard of: Sleipnir. It's a very popular browser in Japan, from a company called Fenrir.

The reason it got my attention is it's an extremely customizable browser, and it allows you to choose whether you want to use Firefox's Gecko rendering engine or Internet Explorer's. If you, as I do, primarily work in Firefox but keep Internet Explorer on hand when you run into trouble such as rendering problems, this browser presents an interesting solution.

As the folks on Download Squad note, there is a Firefox extension that you can use to perform the same two-browser straddle that Sleipnir performs: IETab. IETab embeds the Internet Explorer browser in a Firefox tab. However, I do like the way Sleipnir straddles two rendering engines automatically.

Fenrir has stated that it wants to capture 5 percent of the global browsing market with Sleipnir. That's a tall order with Internet Explorer and Firefox as dominant as they are, but not necessarily undoable. Give Sleipnir a try if you want an easy way to have multiple rendering options available.


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6 Comments
 

Dunno about this one. You only need multiple browsers every so often, and with Firefox getting more and more capable of handling even poorly formed html sites, it is only a matter of time before the need for two browsers is truly required. Sleipnir might be a couple of years too late. Most mac users don't need IE, and can surf the web just fine, and I reckon that even PC users will be there pretty soon, with a single browser strategy...

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It will be interesting to see if you can just do this via a Firefox plugin at some point soon. I think firefox has become a viable competitor in large part due to its marketing efforts too. There are several browsers that use the gecko engine and offer several other features, arguably better too, but have no where close to the adoption that is seen for Firefox. I don't think Sleipnir is going to hit its market share numbers either, since I just don't see this being as big of a pain.

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You can do it via a firefox plugin, been able to do it for years - IE Tab.

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How to customize if there is no documentation, no proper help file, etc.

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I don't see any benefit to this whatsoever

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Firefox and Avant are the best alternatives to just Windows Explorer....period, Opera is good as well.


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