The Classic Browser uses the Chromium renderer to give you a faster, safer web browser by using its own interface and number-crunching routines.

The Classic Browser uses the Chromium renderer to give you a faster, safer web browser by using its own interface and number-crunching routines.

The interface is certainly classic almost giving you an AOL or Netscape, old-school feel. The buttons have a dated fell to them, and a more minimalist approach would be better here. Three of the seven buttons I had to mouse-over to see what they were. That's OK, though, as mentioned this is using Chromium only for rendering, so things are supposed to look different. You can choose your theme, but they aren't themes as much as just different colors.

It uses a multi-search allowing you to search 12 search engines including DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Baidu, and more. You can also choose to search as many of these as you like. A select all button might be nice here, but it will open a new tab for each search engine you choose.

The settings are also different than what you're used to as seen in our second screenshot. You can find your bookmarks and all your settings under one drop-down menu. All the settings also have keyboard shortcuts so that you can quickly turn these options on or off anytime without going into your settings. For example, ALT+2 will open or close Memory Watch as seen in our third screenshot. Browser Options will bring you to a lot of settings that you might want to look at. You can see these in screenshot four below.

Other settings allow you to translate or capture pages, print, block a website, use a proxy server and more. When we tried the proxy server, it gave us a message about the proxy server not working outside of the web browser. There's no way to know if the proxy is working and the keyboard shortcut of ALT+? is technically ALT+SHIFT+?. Neither worked.

Overall, we like where The Classic Browser is headed. There are a few bugs, as mentioned and we'd love to see real themes, not just color changes with a minimalist appearance. In other words, ditch the 70's psychedelic look. It just doesn't work in a web browser anymore; for good reason.

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