Earlier today Naver announced that its Whale browser is now out of beta and was officially launched at Deview 2017, Naver’s annual developer conference.
If you haven’t heard of Whale yet, Naver released a beta version of the browser in December last year. It’s a clean-looking but feature rich browser based on Chromium with quite a few handy bells and whistles. The browser has been developed over five years and over 10,000 people took part in testing and providing feedback on the project.
So what makes it different to other browsers? In addition to tabs, Whale has what are called ’Spaces’, which is essentially splitting one tab into two tabs. But instead of having to click between tabs, you work between two spaces on the same page. The size of each space can be adjusted via the slider in the center of the screen. There is also a quick search feature which pops out a mobile version of Naver on the side of your screen for quick access.
A widget menu also gives you access to tools such as a clock, timer, calculator, calendar, exchange rate, Korean spell checker and more. While Google also provides such info through its search engine, if you multitask a lot and use such tools, it could definitely help boost your productivity. Music support is built-in and connects to four of Korea’s most popular streaming services – Naver Music, Bugs!, MNet and Genie.
Like most browsers these days Whale supports extensions which can be added through the Whale Store. One great thing is that it also supports most Chrome extensions, meaning you can keep your adblockers and other programs that you’ve always used.
And for any of you asking…”What about Korean websites with all those ActiveX plugins?” Like Zum’s Swing Browser, Whale also lets you install Internet Explorer plugins so you can still do your online banking without having to load up IE.
Whale is available in English and can be downloaded from here: http://whale.naver.com/en/download
