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Avant Browser

5 January 2009 No Comment

Avant Browser is a popular freeware web browser from a Chinese programmer named Anderson Che, which unites the Trident layout engine built into Windows (see Internet Explorer shell) with an interface intended to be more feature-rich, flexible and ergonomic than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). It runs on Windows 98 and above, including Windows Vista. Internet Explorer version 6 or 7 must be installed.

As of November 2008, total downloads surpassed 22.5 million.

Avant Browser is currently available in 41 languages.

Avant Browser was largely inspired by Opera, the first major browser to have a multiple document interface. The developer’s objective was to wrap a comparable interface around the layout engine used by Internet Explorer, thereby achieving Opera-like ergonomics without suffering the frequent problems that browser had rendering pages tested only in IE. In fact it was initially released under the name “IEopera”, though this was soon changed due to the obvious trademark issues.

Latterly, Avant’s developer Anderson Che has concentrated on adding user-requested features, and Avant was among the first browsers to have popup blocking, advertising server blocking, and one-click disabling of potential security vulnerabilities such as ActiveX, Java, and scripts.

In the Avant Browser, unlike most other “alternative” browsers, the default search engine is not Google. Instead it uses a version of the Yahoo! search engine, given a custom look and renamed Avantfind, and it is not immediately evident how to change it. However Google and many other search engines are available via the address bar “Quick Search” facility, and instructions on how to change the default to an engine of the user’s choice have been posted by the very active Avant Browser user community.

The community has also created other tools and extensions for Avant, including registry files which allow it to use the Information Bar and other security enhancements of XP SP2.

Alongside Avant, the developer has a sister project known as Orca Browser, an Avant-like shell of Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine as used in Firefox 3 and has similar approaches as Flock. It is in the final testing stage and a public release candidate version is available.