Avant Browser: When You Don’t Like Chrome Or Mozilla Firefox

Avant is a browser not many of you heard of. Created by a Chinese programmer with the Windows Internet Explorer layout engine named Trident (a.k.a. MSHTML), Avant is basically a IE mod, but manages to provide an interesting web browsing experience. It’s an open-source web browser that needs Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8 installed on your PC to work. Some of you might think these are too many fancy words for a web browser, so let’s see if Avant delivers.

Its major inspiration was the Opera browser, the first browser that included the tabbed browsing interface. The developer wanted to combine Internet Explorer’s search engine with a rich and flexible interface to achieve Opera like ergonomics with none of the compatibility issues non-IE browsers usually had in the past.

Avant has all of today’s web browser features like tabbed browsing, integrated search engine, etc. But if there is one feature it lacks it is the parental control that many users are becoming more and more interested of. Another feature that makes this browser very interesting is its support for the sight-impared . Avant let’s us “dive” in a 500% zoom in, a very interesting and unique feature and also has a full screen mode and a minimize option that makes the window go “Bye! Bye!” in the bottom right toolbar. The capacity to synchronize any number of Avant installments on different PCs is another well known and wanted feature this browser supports. You can also run it from a flash drive or an mp3 player without installing it, a very useful feature in my opinion, made available especially for the web’s “hitchhikers”.

As far as security features go, Avant responds with support against viruses, pop-ups, malware but not against phishing (a major drawback in my opinion). You can also remove cookies and history just like Internet Explorer, simple all the way.

Overall, Avant is an very interesting alternative for those of you that think Firefox has just too many add-ons and also for users that are not that much into Chrome’s minimalism. Avant presents a number of very interesting features, features that make Avant a fun-to-play-with web browser. I enjoyed it, will you? Here is the link for a free Avant Browser download.