Sleipnir

In Norse mythology, Sleipnir is Odin’s eight-legged horse. In the hands of Fenrir’s developers, it’s a fast and stylish Web browser that brings some of the touch-style functionality of tablets and smartphones to your desktop (sort of like Windows 8 — coincidence?) especially in fullscreen mode. It’s built on top of Mozilla’s Gecko engine, like Firefox and many other browsers, so it loads fast and renders pages beautifully. But Sleipnir has a unique, attractive style as well as features that set it apart, most notably the way it uses your mouse to simulate touch commands.

Sleipnir’s main view has many familiar touches from the Mozilla toolkit. It’s a clean, attractive, and balanced design, with logically placed buttons and icons, and widely customizable, too. The start page describes Sleipnir’s features, many of which come into their own in the full-screen view. We clicked the full-screen icon, which does indeed open a colorful yet well-defined space, especially on a widescreen monitor. As a browser, Sleipnir works as well as any, and better than some. We started by importing our bookmarks from Google Chrome with an efficient and flexible tool. We typed in some searches in the address bar. Sleipnir searched with Google, though we could easily search with other search engines as well as e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and eBay. And Sleipnir’s toolbar and start menu gave us access to everything we needed in the way of settings and options.

But the coolest thing by far is the way Sleipnir simulates finger-flicks: Hold down the right mouse button, grab a page, and flick it left, right, up, or down to cycle through your open tabs, or grab a tab and drag it open. The action is very smooth and natural and a lot like scrolling through pages on your phone with your thumb. Sleipnir also supports mouse gestures and mouse aliases, keyboard commands, plug-ins, customizable rendering for individual sites, and much more. And that’s not all: Sleipnir is also available in mobile versions for Apple, Android, and Windows Phone platforms as well as the Mac. Sleipnir doesn’t need eight legs to stand out in the browser field.