Like most Android apps, the default Android web browser only shows you one web page at a time. Sure, if you’re using Android 3.0 or later you can use browser tabs to quickly flip between multiple website, but what if you want to see two web pages side by side?
It turns out there’s an app for that.
OverSkreen is a new web browser for Android which lets you open multiple browser windows.
What’s interesting is that the windows don’t take up the full screen, and instead rest on top of whatever home screen or app you were running when you launched OverSkreen. That’s hardly a novel concept. Windows, Mac, and Linux computers have been doing this for ages, but it’s an unusual approach for an Android app.
You can resize an OverSkreen browser window by tapping and dragging the corner — and you can open multiple windows and position them side by side so that you can view two or more websites on the same screen.
The app feels a little glitchy at times. When you have multiple windows open and try to pull up the keyboard to enter text, for instance, half the keyboard may appear to be hidden by one of the browser windows. I don’t think that’s entirely the developer’s fault though — Android simply isn’t designed to deal with this kind of multi-window design and the keyboard tries to pop up on top of the current window… not both current windows.
The web browser supports all the basic features you’d expect including bookmarks, plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, and user agent switching.
OnSkreen is available from the Android Market for $1.49 during a launch sale. The price will double soon.
via Droid Life
Mobile Opera had multi-tab browsing in Android for ages. And no, I don’t see why you would want to have several minuscule windows opened side-by-side on an already fairly small screen.
Would love to see Andoird get this functionality natively, and for any application. Maybe soon.