One of the things you learn as a reviewer is just how long the long tail really is. There are more "alternative" browsers out there than most people could guess, and it's hard for most of them to offer any reason to switch from the top tier. Visual Explorer Ultimate offers one major piece of functionality that's tempting, but narrowly focused.
Video Explorer Ultimate may be my choice for archiving videos from the Web, but not too much else.So let's go for the good stuff first. Streaming video is wonderful but transient; sites vanish, videos are pulled for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and the time you most want to watch a particular video is always when you can't get an Internet connection for some reason. There are many plug-ins for downloading streaming video for different browsers, but my experience with them has been uneven and, being plug-ins, they often break when the browser is upgraded, which now happens approximately once a week with Firefox. Visual Explorer Ultimate builds video downloading--and, even better, conversion--right in.
If you're on YouTube, or any of the dozens of other supported sites, you merely click the disk icon (if you're under 20, you'll recognize this as the abstract image every program uses to mean 'save,'), and it will save the active video. One of the more useful functions is stripping out the video and just saving the audio as an MP3, which is a surprisingly annoying process otherwise. Visual Explorer Ultimate is almost worth keeping around just for that; I've got standalone programs that do the same thing, except less easily and reliably. You can also save in iPad format, MPG, and others, avoiding conversion hassles.
While Visual Explorer Ultimate supports many streaming sites, there are some it does not, mostly in the, ahem, skeevier side of the net. In the interests of fully testing the program, I will note it does support some sites dedicated to what the song famously notes the Internet is for, but you will need to research this on your own.
There are some features that Visual Explorer Ultimate provides which are uncommon and deserve mention, though I don't personally find them compelling. One is the "cloaking device" which makes the window partially transparent, allegedly to foil people glancing sidelong at your screen... but if it's transparent enough to hide what you're doing from them, it's too transparent to use, or at least that was my experience. There's a "video browser" mode that changes the normal URL bar into a customized video search engine, and allows you to create custom sets of video sites to search from, which is nice, but useful only if most of your time is spent searching for videos (which it might well be).
Other than that, Visual Explorer Ultimate is... a browser. It has tabs, it has sidebar bookmarks (something Chrome still doesn't have, I must note), it renders pages adequately most of the time, and so on. It is also somewhat quirky; I found a few bugs in rendering and general functionality when I reviewed 3.0; these are very quickly fixed for 3.1, which is the final version being reviewed, but there were still oddities and one crash to desktop during general browsing. While every browser is occasionally unstable, Visual Explorer Ultimate seems to have more minor glitches than average, many of which do go away if you hide and then show the window.
Being free, Visual Explorer Ultimate is worth considering if you do any kind of regular video downloading or converting. The development team is active and responsive, always a positive sign. If you've been unsatisfied with plug-in solutions or third party programs when it comes to getting streaming video off the screen and onto your hard disk, Visual Explorer Ultimate is definitely worth downloading.
--Ian Harac
Visual Explorer is the ultimate, fully featured web browser that comes with advanced privacy and security features, one-click Google searches, support for Internet Explorer favorites, add-ons and much more. Your privacy protected - easily remove private data such as web site addresses you have typed into the address bar or content from web pages you have visited. Use the Cloaking Device feature to make the browser semi-transparent so casual observers cannot snoop on your browsing activities. Security when surfing - the integrated safety filter protects you against phishing websites. It performs checks before loading each web page and, unlike other browsers, also uniquely checks the final destination page (to protect you against the original website re-directing you to a phishing website). Instantly find text on the current web page - with options to highlight all instances, using the Advanced Find toolbar. Perform Google searches with a single click - right-click any word or phrase on the current web page to search for it using Google or your favorite search engine. Additional pre-installed search sites include Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. Print web pages how they appear on screen - Visual Explorer is the only known browser that respects the WYSIWYG philosophy when it comes to printing pages. While other browsers reformat printed pages, Visual Explorer faithfully sends to the printer the exact page layout and format as seen on screen. Block unwanted ads and other media - with a range of content filters, Visual Explorer gives you control over what you see. Easily block unwanted websites or website content from appearing (Flash adverts, pop-ups, harmful scripts and more). Customize to suit your needs - Visual Explorer is fully customizable from themes and skins to mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, toolbars and menus. Visual Explorer supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7.
From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here
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