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Lightning Browser – Fast, simple, reliable mobile web browser for Google Android

lightning Browser

Lightning browser is a fast, simple and lightweight free mobile web browser for Google Android smartphones, and tablets. Using Google Android to surf the web can be slow, and unreliable on many mobile web browsers because of slowdown problems caused by not having enough RAM like 512MB RAM, or a slow CPU Processor which is 800 MHz on your phone or tablet. In my experience, when I use a slower tablet, or phone to surf the web, I experience more crashes, and freezes where my web browser does not work, crashes and sometimes my whole mobile device freezes.Lightning browser also use under 2MB of storage space, so it is great for Google Android smartphones and tablets which don’t have a lot of free storage space for storing apps, system files, and personal files.

When I use Lightning Browser to browse the web, I get almost no slow down problems. Lightning Browser starts up in a second after I tap on its shortcut on my Android home screen. Websites load pretty quickly in Lightning Browser. Scrolling up and down websites is fast as well. Video playback on YouTube, and other video sites is fast. Lightning Browser supports Flash as well. I notice that most sites load the faster mobile smartphone version of their website instead of the desktop version in Lightning Browser. In the past, while using other mobile web browsers for Android like Google Chrome certain sites like The Huffington Post mistake my tablet/smartphone as a desktop computer, so it loads the desktop website which is slower loading on a mobile connection. I notice comments from Disqus, Livefyre, Facebook,etc and videos which are embedded on websites, and blogs also load faster in Lightning than other mobile web browsers.

Using Lightning browser is easy to use. It has tabs, bookmarks, autofill, an address bar, back, forward, refresh, stop, and full screen mode like other popular web browsers. I like that I can access my tabs by swiping my finger on the left edge of my tablet’s screen. On the new tabs left panel, there is also a back and forward button on the bottom for going back, or forward a page. When you Long-press the back button, you exits the browser. When you Long-press a link, you open the link in a new tab. Opening my bookmark bar is simple as well. I just need to swipe my finger from the right edge of my tablet’s screen. The bookmark titles are organized in Alphabetical (ABC) order, so they are easy to find bookmarks in Alphabetical order rather than having no order. It is easy to view my history, add a bookmark, and access my settings by tapping on the top right menu button on Lightning Browser. It is pretty simple to open the settings to make changes to the settings for Lightning Browser like changing the search engine provider to Google, DuckDuckGo, StartPage, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, setting the user agent to desktop or mobile, clearing internet history, and disabling flash and JavaScript. You can also search for keywords within a website’s page with Lightning’s keyword search engine found in the menu on the browser. Lightning Browser has a website sharing/saving feature to let you save, and share websites to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Pocket, and other social networking, saving, and chat apps, so you can share websites with friends on social networking, email, and chat sites, and save websites to view offline when you are not connected to the internet, on a slow internet connection, and to view offline articles from your device to save data on your limited data plan which has expensive overage fees.

There is also an incognito browsing mode in lightning to privately browse the web without saving your browsing history on your mobile.

Lightning browser is very reliable. It starts up quickly, and does not freezes after I launch it from the Google Android homescreen. I can use it for more than an hour to browse the web, watch web video on YouTube, and Lightning browser does not crash or freeze when I use it for hours. It can also load desktop sites without slowing down as much as other browsers.

Lightning Browser also uses very screen space there is only 1 row for the address bar and menu button, and the rest of the space Lightning browser uses is for displaying the website. There is also a full screen mode in Lightning browser which uses the entire screen on a phone or tablet for displaying the website. You can also set Lightning browser to hide the status bar to use even more of your screen’s space for browsing the web.

The amount of storage space which Lighting Browser takes up is very small. It uses less than 2 MB of space on my Google Android tablet. It uses the Native JavaScript and WebKit browser Engine, so the file size of the app is smaller, and the browser runs faster than other browsers.

Lightning is one of the fastest, simplest, and most reliable third-party Google Android mobile web browsers I ever use. It is a great mobile web browser for slower smartphones, and tablets, and for users who want a lightweight, fast, simple, and reliable web browser for their mobile.

You can download Lightning Browser at the Google Play store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=acr.browser.barebones

Lightning is compatible with Google Android 2.2-4.4 devices.

4 comments… add one
  • android user March 27, 2015, 12:26 pm

    Lightning makes ABSOLUTELY ZERO provision for clearing Google search history suggestions. In Google, once you search for a topic, that search topic will be stuck in the search suggestions.

    Clearing search history in Lightning has no bearing on this, either. Barring rooting your device and installing TitaniumBackup to delete the data(including your cookies) you are SOL.

    • Johnson Yip March 29, 2015, 10:55 pm

      Hopefully, the maker of Lightning updates it web browser for easily clearing Google Search History Suggestion in future versions which he releases.

      Maybe using an Alternative search engine like DuckDuckGo which can search Encrypted Google Search by adding a !G to the search would help solve your problem with Google saving Search Suggestions.

      • luihi January 2, 2016, 10:38 am

        Very good browser, only one thing i don’t understand is hiw to import bookmarks from firefox

        • Johnson Yip January 3, 2016, 12:26 am

          I agree Lightning is a very nice web browser.

          I think you need to manually import your bookmarks by typing them in in the address bar, going to the website, and using the bookmark feature in Lightning.

          Sadly, there are not many mobile browsers which let you import bookmarks from a bookmark import file, or other browsers like desktop browsers,

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