Browse Smarter & Faster With Triple Rendering Engine Browser Lunascape

It really isn’t often that I take any interest in exploring new Internet browsers. To be honest, Chrome and Firefox pretty much do everything I want to do. I avoid Internet Explorer like the plague. As far as any new potential players in the browser market are concerned, the possibilities don’t look very promising. So I was a little bit surprised to come across a relatively new browser with some unique features that really caught my eye.

One of the things that has always irritated me about the various browsers is that there are some pretty cool features in some that are lacking in others, and each of them use one of three or four “rendering engines.” A rendering engine is the part of the browser that does most of the work – it reads in web content in the form of HTML, XML, CSS and other client-side mark-up languages, and then displays that coded information in a graphical, well-formatted webpage. These engines can actually be embedded into more than just browsers – many e-mail clients, RSS readers and other applications now have the rendering engine built in. The IE engine, Trident, is the one most commonly used.
Each rendering engine has subtle differences, and if one of your favorite pages doesn’t display right, or you are a web developer and need to see how each engine formats the page, then you’re faced with installing several browsers that use the different engines.

Browse With Multiple Rendering Engines

All you have to do now is install the Lunascape browser, and you can switch rendering engines on the fly. This is great for web designers, and it’s also great for anyone that wants a browser that will display every page on the net correctly, even if it was programmed to work for one particular rendering engine.
When you first install Lunascape, you’ll have the option to import bookmarks, settings, and even many of your favorite add-ons, into the Lunascape browser.

You have the ability to switch multiple rendering engines at will with Lunascape, but during install you can choose which engine you’d prefer as your default. Since I prefer Firefox, which uses the Gecko engine, that’s the one I chose.

The default skin for Lunascape is a silvery/gray that I personally feel leaves much to be desired. An important order of business for me is to change the skin. But first I wanted to poke around to see if Lunascape has anything unique to offer by default – without the need for plugins. As you can see here, the display is very much tab-based, with quick links in the menu bar and a navigational bar that’s fairly straightforward. You also have a leftbar with favorite links, history and RSS feeds.

If, at any point, you want to change the rendering engine, just look at the lower left corner of the browser and click the icon there. You’ll see a pop-up where you can change the engine on the fly. A cool feature is that if you find a website that only displays correctly with one specific engine, you can actually tell Lunascape to always load that page with that rendering engine.

If you look at the lower right of the window, you’ll see a group of icons with a lock, an eye and more. This is the security and privacy area. You can use these to take a look at detailed information about the page, including any robots, whether your connection is encrypted, and more.

Click on the Security tab to see if the site stores cookies on our computer or review any saved passwords for the site.

At the Lunascape website, you can sift through hundreds of browser skins to make the look and feel of the browser a bit more personalized for your tastes. There are both “official” skins as well as many user-submitted designs. The one I went with is a dark theme called Luna Drive. It’s a cool theme, although unlike the display I have below, you’re supposed to slide the URL field over to the right so the speed gauges are displayed in all their glory!

Extra Lunascape Features

Beyond the multiple-engine feature – which is awesome – there are also lots of extras that make Lunascape a browser worth checking out. For example, there are dozens of preloaded scripts and bookmarklets you can choose from to further customize your browsing experience.

There’s also a quick dropdown selection in the menu bar that you can use to switch your tabbed display from a single-page display to one that displays all pages either vertical or horizontal. This is especially nice when you need to work on two pages at once (like editing, reading the news, and blogging all at once).

Each of the navigational and display features that you really want on-the-fly are all available in the dropdown menus. Modifying which buttons are displayed are as easy as clicking on “Add or Remove Buttons.” You can just about customize everything about how Lunascape looks and behaves to suit your tastes.

The bottom line is that while I don’t normally entertain changing browsers, I’ve decided to switch over to Lunascape and see how well it treats me for a while. So far, it appears to do just about everything I liked about Firefox and Chrome, and page-load time really appears to scream with Lunascape. The site claims it’s the fastest browser – but that claim would really have to be put to the test to confirm.
If you want to freshen up your browsing experience, give Lunascape a try. Let us know what you liked or didn’t like about the browser in the comments section below.