The Techie Guy – Liron Segev

During the BlackBerry 10 launch a great deal of emphasis was made on the 70 000 apps in the BlackBerry World and no time discussing or showing the Web Browser. This was surprising since most of us spend our mobile-life in the web browser after tapping on links from Twitter, Facebook, Emails.

So how is the Blackberry Z10 Browser ?

Let me start by saying that the BlackBerry Browser of old is no where to be found. Instead the Z10 has a great little browser that is fast and more than capable of handling the toughest websites thrown at it.

It has everything that you want from a browser including multiple tabs, history, bookmarks, ability to add sites to the home screen (so they look like apps). It also has the “Reader” function that lets you strip away ads or fancy shmency prettiness from a web page and just rendered the text and relevant images. This is great if you want to just read the content and ignore the obvious-desktop-targeted ads. One thing that I would have liked to see is the ability to “save offline” so I can read webpages later when I don’t have internet connections for example on a plane.

Don’t forget that it does full Flash – so if you have a need for those sites that haven’t gone to HTML5 this is browser is your best friend.

My pet hate is when a website forces you to view their mobi site. A nice little setting option is the ability to request the Desktop version of sites and not the Mobile version of the site. Although I would have preferred this to be available in the menu rather than in the settings as a permanent on/ off. Maybe in the next update ?

Site loaded in Mobile Mode	Site loaded in Desktop Mode

How to change the default search:

The web browser uses Bing as its underlying search engine. If you have an affinity for another search engine such as Google or Yahoo, you can easily change the default search engine.

Here is how:

Open the browser and start typing a search query: eg. “TheTechieGuy”

You will notice on the top there is a drop down box with the Bing logo. Tap on that and select either Google or Yahoo.

From now on, the browser will use your selected search engine until you change it again. Simple.

More BlackBerry Z10 tips coming up soon