Discover Lunascape

The concept is quite simple. A multi-engined browser.

We’ve all come across the issues with web sites working in Firefox and not IE, or looking fine in IE, but not in Safari.

Lunascape.tv">Lunascape is setting out to bring the Trident engine (used in IE); the Gecko engine (used in Firefox); and the Webkit engine (used in Safari and Chrome) together in one browser application, and choose for you automatically which engine to use based on which web site you visit.

Downloading the browser was easy enough. Click on the big ‘Free Download’ button on the Lunascape Website and away you go. After downloading you can choose a standard installation, when the installer sets it’s own defaults, or a custom installation, where you get to choose which engines to install. I chose the custom installation, as I almost always do, even if only out of curiosity. I can’t actually see why you’d only want to install this browser with one engine. That would seem to defeat the point of installing it in the first place.

I was given options to pick which Engine I’d like to use by default, and a summary of which each engine did, and it’s pros and cons. I was also given the option to import favorites from an existing browser. I choose the Gecko engine (as I’m a Firefox fan), and I didn’t import any favorites at this time.

Once you’ve installed it, and if you pick the option to run it, or start it manually you’ll end up at this screen.

You’re presented with this on your screen.

My first impression is that it all looks intuitive. If you’ve used a browser before you should be able to use this pretty much straight off the starting block.

Back/Forward buttons, a Favorites one, with the option to Add new favorites or Organize the ones you have. There’s a drop down arrow next that allows me to choose font size for display. By default it’s set on Medium. I’ve left it there for now. Next comes the address bar for entering URLs. I entered the URL for my personal blog ‘The Eye’ at http://wildcabbage.net, and it paused, told me it was initializing the gecko engine, and then gave me an error – ‘can’t setup property – and complained about setting images, add-ins, and javascript.

Closing the browser down, and re-opening it, seemed to do the trick. ‘The Eye’ displayed without any issues after that. Clciking on articles with the blog, it seemed to run with similar performance to Firefox, but then it was using the Gecko engine by default, so perhaps this is hardly surprising!

I was also asked if I wanted a new tab to be activated each time I choose a new URL in the address bar, so I said yes.

Now, back to the toolbars.

Next to the URL box, is the search box. This is set at Google by default, but there are a number of options available by clicking on the drop-down arrow at the left hand side of the box.

Next to that are amazon and ebay search icons – although they are two of the options in the drop down I just mentioned in the previous paragraph.

The next two buttons, namely ‘search’ and ‘highlight’ didn’t appear to do anything here.

There is a drop down arrow at the far right end, and clciking on that gave me more options. Touching on them briefly, I could change design (the skin) change mode, change favorites, and manage add-ins. Attempting to change the first two gave me errors – failure to save skin style – although I didn’t, at this stage, investigate further to see if this was a browser issue on a Vista security one.

I didn’t attempt as yet to add any add-ins.

The final l option on that drop-down is views, and here you can set which toolbars you want to display; if you wish to display the sidebar, and what content you want in it.

Moving down to the next row, are some RSS feeds, Clicking on one drops down a list of articles in the feed; clicking on a list item opens that page in the browser. Nicely done in my opinion, and quick too.

After this comes more icons. Luna TV takes us back to the Luna.TV start page, but I suspect more is to come at this address.

The next icon allows us to change the design, but as already mentioned, I couldn’t get that to play ball on my Vista system here.

Next along comes the menu icon. From here you can control all aspects of the browser from printing pages to setting the home page, running scripts, setting security levels, getting online help and much more.

There’s a separate print icon next to this, then a help icon, and a ‘close tab’ icon. A little arrow at the end allows you to add or remove more buttons.

Underneath this row are our tabs for the pages we have open, and they function in a pretty much standard way, Click on one to display the associated page, and you also get a cross appear, so you can close it. A plus sign at the end of the tabs allows you to open another blank page.

At the far end of this row is a new ticker, and there are various installed tickers there – such as CNN, Digg, BBC and TechCrunch. You have the option to add more. Click on any one of the news ticker items as they display, and a new tab and page opens with the full article from the web site. Again, a nice touch, and it works quickly.

Along the bottom are small icons for starting or restarting pop-ups, allowing images or video to display and to add the current page as a feed, and a magnifier too.

First impressions?

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