India-optimized Web browser

This free Mozilla-based browser offers much more than support for India's languages.

Hidden Reflex's Epic is a free Firefox-based Web browser optimized to support the major languages of India: Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, and Punjabi. It's not a Firefox clone, though, nor is its appeal limited to those who speak or use the languages it supports. It offers a lot of unique features and a plethora of extras, making it a good alternative browser on its own merits.

Like Firefox, Epic is based on Mozilla's open-source code, so it has a familiar feel right from the start. Epic adds additional character sets, fonts, and menu entries. Epic has a unique and attractive theme, with optional skins, though we like the attractive colors and well-rendered icons of the default view. A slender left-hand sidebar linked to a wide variety of apps, tasks, and sites that opened in a larger Epic Apps sidebar. Epic boasts some 1,500 applications; naturally, they cover a lot of topics, interests, and needs--everything from antivirus to games--and many of them are useful to general users and not just Indic speakers. However, anyone with daily needs, ties to, interest in, or business with India will find apps for everything from food and drink to religion. The apps panel toggles open and closed; tabs for browsing and managing the apps made sampling them easy, too. Since it's based on Mozilla, Epic browses and loads as quickly as Firefox. It updates manually or automatically, too, and it uses the latest versions of Mozilla.

Epic's Indian languages, attractive interface, and Epic Apps distinguishes it from Firefox, but it offers still more, such as its built-in antivirus and antiphishing applications that can kill viruses and suspicious programs before they even get to your regular security software. Epic's support for Indian languages makes it a must-have for Indian speakers, but it can more than hold its own against other browsers. If you try it, we think you'll like it. We did!

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