Epic: A Web Browser Made For India, By India

While it’s hard for a new browser to make an international impact, one can argue that there are still untapped opportunities on a regional level. For example, Maxthon is hugely popular in China, yet it remains largely unknown internationally. Bangalore based startup Hidden Reflex certainly believes that it can gain sufficient traction by offering a distinctive Indian flavor.

Epic, which is based on Mozilla Firefox, cleverly taps into several already available services to serve content tailored for Indian users. Among other things, it uses Google Indic Transliteration tool to enable typing in Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. The custom sidebar also offers one-click access to regional and national news including live video streams (served by NDTV), cricket match scores, share market updates and music charts. Epic also provides box file backup (through Gmail), mail (Yahoo and Gmail) and social networking (Facebook, Twitter and Orkut) apps. Additional security is provided through ESET NOD32 and WOT. If you want more you can alwaysinstall more apps from Epic’s online gallery, which currently houses more than 1,500 applications. Additionally, since Epic is based on Firefox, it also supports standard Firefox extensions.

On the whole, Epic impressed me with its features as well as overall execution. It’s a lot more than just another Firefox port, which is what I had initially expected it to be. The fact that it is built on top of Firefox, which is already fairly popular, should come to its advantage. Casual users are notorious for sticking to what they are already familiar with. In spite of being packed to the brim with features, Epic does well to keep them neatly tucked away in a separate corner. The additional features doesn’t get in your way. Epic still very much feels and behaves like Firefox. At the same time, the default persona is a bit gaudy and Epic would do well to adopt the new minimalistic theme Mozilla is embracing.