Hydra is a web browser, intended to be a good companion to your primary browser. Hydra is loaded with features built right into the software, such as a translator (using three services publicly available – Google, Babelfish and Tranexp), autologger, form filler (sort off…), RSS reader, radio stations chooser, rich sidebar, power search and so on. It comes with predefined favorites consisting of carefully picked sites, most of which tops their category. In fact, Hydra is your ‘swiss knife’ for the web…
What not to expect from Hydra:
1. Speed – at best, Hydra is as fast as Internet Explorer, since it shares IE rendering engine (Trident). One can argue that Hydra can, in fact, speed your browsing through the use of Presets (sets of pages that load simultaneously…), since most of the people visit some pages regularly this can significantly contribute to reducing the time needed to access those pages. Hydra also features few other handy tools speeding up the browsing, such as autologging and Power Search…
2. Low memory consumption – Hydra is built on .Net Framework and thus it requires quite a lot of resources. However, if you minimize it, it will consume only the minimum memory required to keep it alive (reducing memory consumption from 120 MB to 7MB effectively…).
3. To completely replace your primary browser – Hydra is a great product with a lot of potential, but it is not mature enough to claim its independence. In time, this will hopefully change (once Hydra starts to use Gecko as its underlying rendering engine 🙂
