Over at downloadsquad.com they talked about the HydraBrowser and how it may go too far with features.
It looks like Internet Explorer with enough add ons to make it “special”. It was special alright; after I ran it it wanted a user ID and password. I canceled that (I just wanted to see the web) and entered a cnn.com as the URL.
Nothing. No error message, nada.
Control Panel -> Uninstall Software -> Hydra Setup (publisher is listed as Microsoft?) and good bye. Back to Firefox for me. Install to uninstall in less that 10 minutes. I’m sure if it were some other software I’d spend some time with it, but it’s a web browser. How hard should it be?
Update: After the author left some good feedback below, I installed v1.07 on my laptop. It’s not bad and I’m listening to radio via Hydra as I update this. The browser goes for the Office 2007 look and the layout is not bad.
My laptop and PC both have a 16:10 aspect ratio and that permits Hydra to display the web page well and still leave room for the content. The RSS reader looks familiar; I’m a huge Google Reader fan so I probably wont be using that feature. The integration is interesting but the overall experience feels like the product is still developing.
That’s not a bad thing at all. My complaint originally was that without setting up an Admin user, you could not even use the browser. The author’s v1.07 which I’ve just installed, plainly says if you don’t create an account you can still use the guest access. That’s good responsiveness to a “feature request” which was not even in his forum.
I’ll continue to kick the tires some more. I doubt I’ll leave Firefox 2.x anytime soon (Firefox 3 beta 5 annoys me; don’t know why but it does) but I’m glad to see someone is working on another alternative outside of Opera and Firefox.
Author says:
Hello!
As Hydra author I very much appreciate your effort to even try Hydra. Should I mention my disapointment with your disapointment? Well, anyway, the user id and password are not requested, the only thing Hydra asks when it starts is to set up your Admin account password for using Hydra, in order to be able to add another users. This is in fact the premise for using separate accounts in Hydra independently from your current Windows account. Of course, when you canceled out the login screen, you actualy had no account whatsoever (not even a standard Guest account…), so none of the Hydra tools were loaded (thanks for pointing out to this issue, I’ll try to resolve it in the next version)
Regards!
April 16, 2008 — 11:42 am
Jan Dembowski says:
That’s one of the things I like about the Internet. It’s all well and easily connected (also a bad thing sometimes).
Well, you took the time to read and reply to my posting. Fair is fair, so when I get home tonight I’ll download a fresh copy of HydraBrowser and create an account and kick the tires.
As a rule I find Internet Explorer 7 cumbersome. If Hydra can address some of those issues, then I’ll try it out.
April 16, 2008 — 1:34 pm
Author says:
Didn’t mean to put a pressure on you, sorry. It’s your God given right to like or dislike something based on whichever reasons you choose (that’s the point of democracy 🙂 In fact your blog helped me to identify an obvious flaw in my software, and I appreciate it. Thanks! (and I hope Hydra will convert you to its camp – maybe not right now, but in a year or two, who knows… remember Firefox four years ago? 😉
April 16, 2008 — 6:07 pm
Jan Dembowski says:
No, no, it’s all good. No pressure applied!
On a whim I installed your software, had problems with it, and quickly removed it. You found my post and commented on my experience. Nothing to be worried about :).
See updated post above for my experience.
April 19, 2008 — 7:57 am