Epic: a new browser with India in its heart

As published in DNA Bangalore

From Internet Explorer to the latest Google Chrome, browsers have come a long way in the past two decades. While US-based companies like Microsoft and Mozilla have been dominating the browser market so far, Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore-based company, may just put India on the global map with its first Indian browser, Epic.
While Google is building a whole new operating system around their Google Chrome web browser, Epic works with Windows XP and can help you manage almost all the work you have to do on a computer. It comes packed with a huge array of web applications and allows you to type in all Indian languages.
“Apart from the fact that one can type in all Indian languages, there are more features that makes Epic unique. For instance, it has an in-built anti-virus, which can scan files as they are being downloaded apart from scanning the ones that already exist in the computer. Also, one doesn’t need to install a separate anti-virus software to protect the computer,” says Alok Bhardwaj, founder and CEO of Hidden Reflex. “We have tied-up with Eset, a leading anti-virus company for the signatures.”
Bhardwaj was born in the US and lived there until two years ago, when he came to India to start working on Epic. The brain behind the first Indian browser, Bhardwaj chose India to work in keeping the financial factor in mind. He was assisted by a team of three others on this project.
“When we started off, we wanted to make a browser — targeted at geeks — people who stay online the whole day. We incorporated sidebars where they could access social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook without opening a separate window,” says Bharadwaj. However, the final product is user friendly and is targeted at all Indian users, not just the geeks. Epic also boasts of an application store with around 1,500 web apps, that can be added to the sidebar.
Bhardwaj says: “We decided to build Epic on Mozilla as it already had a great ecosystem with plugins and themes.” The browser, though based on Firefox, looks similar to Chrome.
Epic also packs in a feature known as collections, which acts like a folder for web pages one visits frequently. For example, a user can create a collection of Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and click on the collection whenever he or she wants to catch up with friends.
According to Bharadwaj, the browser will use lower memory than Chrome. you can download the browser from here.


3 responses to “Epic: a new browser with India in its heart”
  1. chrome tips Avatar

    now, that’s news ! 🙂

    1. | Balu | Avatar

      Yes yes, time to start epic tips =D

      1. chrome tips Avatar

        not really 😀 busy with chrome tips atm 😀

Leave a Reply to chrome tipsCancel reply