Browsers

If you’ve ever been worried about what your kids find online, Happly from Daily Interactive can help.

This free iPad offers a curated browsing experience that has been pruned of all the interesting content on the web, including violent videos, inappropriate images like goatse, and other stuff that make life interesting.

The app instead offers a curated browsing experience. The iTunes listing has more detail:

Happly has partnered with some of the world’s most talented experts: National Geographic photographers, award-winning children’s book authors and illustrators and other great thinkers. Each week the Happly topics and content expand so your family’s learning opportunities do as well.

Customize a family experience with the easy to use Happly tools. Parents can pick and choose to add additional links, post videos, share articles or product reviews to tailor Happly based on each family member’s unique interests. Using a four digit pass key, parents can set the screen and contents for a particular child and lock the application. The child can then access all of that unique content for great learning and play time on Happly.

iTunes

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

There are lots of web browsers, and there are lots of web browsers for Android. But here’s one that does something a little different. TextOnly functions exactly like what the name suggests. It strips out most of the formatting, ads, and images found on a web page and it only shows you the basic text and links.

While this broser might not appeal to you, I have had times where I have severely limited internet connection. TextOnly can help in that situation be filtering out the extraneous content, and only showing you the important stuff.

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MacRumors found a hidden feature in one of the early developer builds of the next version of OSX, which has not yet been released. The new ability is called reading list, and here’s how Apple described it:

Reading List lets you collect webpages and links for you to read later. To add the current page to your Reading List, click Add Page. You can also Shift-click a link to quickly add it to the list. To hide and show Reading List, click the Reading List icon (eyeglasses) in the bookmarks bar.

It’s going to be part of Safari, and it’s clear from the description that this is intended as a competitor to Instapaper and ReaditLater. But it won’t be a serious competitor. Both Instapaper and ReaditLater support multiple bronsers on multiple OSes and that will give them a major advantage over Safari’s Reading List.

Speaking of Safari, iOS 4.3.3 is supposed to drop soon. If you download it, you might want to check to see if that version of Safari also has this feature.

Have you heard of Ibis Reader? It’s a browser based reading app that will let you open and read an Epub from any browser. But it has one minor problem; you can’t read your own eBooks, just one you download from a limited number of sources.

I found a couple Firefox plugins that can read your Epub: Lucifox and EpubReader. Normally I’d  discuss the qualities of both plug-ins, but I cannot get Lucifox to run on Firefox v4.x.  EpubReader worked without a problem, so I strongly urge you to use that one. EpubReader supports TOC, 2 columns of text, and in general is a very nice reading app.

There are a lot of very good reading apps available, but I prefer to do more in a browser rather than run a bunch of apps. Part of this is because my old computer was slow, but I’ve also noticed that I can switch between tabs in Firefox faster than I can switch between apps. This is part of the reason i don’t use a Twitter app and instead visit the website from my browser.

Update: The crossed out section was a factual error. Thanks, Liza.

Mozilla

The Dolphin HD Web Browser, widely regarded as one of the better browsers on Android, got a new optional update recently. This update comes in the form of an add-on, and it adds support for Google Docs.

You can now use Dolphin HD to view PDFs, Powerpoint, and MSWord files. All you need to do is click on the file and it should open in just a few seconds (depending on the speed of your connection). You can even use this add-on to save the files on your Android device.

It’s available now in the Android Market. And if you like this browser and plug-in, you might want to check out the many other options available.

If you’re curious about the Dolphin browser, you can try it here.

via Dolphin

Writers reading and working on iPads or iPhones should check out iCab Mobile Internet browser. As you can see by the iPad screenshot embedded above, the browser allows you to do some useful things with online content.

With the browser’s simple tools you can save the page to Instapaper to read offline, convert it to ePub to read on your favorite eReader, or open the page in GoodReader. Once you’ve installed the browser on your device, you can download these useful tools at this link.

Are you looking for a new browser for your iPad or iPhone? In this first installment in an ongoing series, we are testing different iPhone and iPad browsers that you can use instead of the Safari browser on your mobile device. Share your favorite browser in the comments for a future Best iPad Browser post.

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