It’s much easier to use than many of its rivals, which are feature-packed but often fiddly. Open a page in Miren and it’ll default to its full-screen view – which automatically hides Android’s status bar, too – so you can take advantage of every one of your device’s precious pixels.

Navigation options are both useful and unobtrusive, hidden in the corners of the screen and fading from view if they’re not in use. The right-hand corner houses a button to open Miren’s address bar as well as a handy loading dial, and the bottom-left corner provides a back button. The top of the screen provides links to your tabs alongside a small symbol to open a new page.

Desktop-style features are present elsewhere to make life easier. Chrome users will be familiar with the eight thumbnail images of your favourite sites that appear on boot, and they’re present here, too, alongside links to your bookmarks, history and downloads. Those eight thumbnails can also be customised with links to either a selection of bookmarks or simply the sites you visit most.

Delve into Miren’s intuitive interface and more options become available. A small star beside the address bar lets you easily bookmark a page, and the address bar will bring up likely URLs and search suggestions once you’ve started typing – an invaluable feature that’ll be familiar to any Chrome or Firexox users.

The settings menu is divided into basic and advanced modes, with the former providing simple text side, image loading and cache-clearing options and the latter allowing you to delve into much more detail.

Flash can be disabled, for instance, if you’d prefer the full iPhone browsing experience, and a whole range of page zooming, pop-up blocking and encoding settings can be tweaked. Privacy and security options include clearing your cache, history, cookies and form data, and your passwords can be remembered or cleared with the click of a button.

Miren has options beyond those of other Android browsers, too. Your bookmarks and data can be automatically backed up to your phone and imported from your SD card, and the full-screen mode’s floating buttons can be deactivated or set to automatically fade from view if you’re not using them. There’s even a neat option to pause all downloads if you’re not longer using Wi-Fi, to ensure that you don’t incur high data charges. The only thing we’re missing, at least on the surface, is the option to enable desktop rather than mobile versions of sites.

It has almost all the options you’d want, packed into one of the best interfaces we’ve seen of any browser on the Android platform. It’s free, available right now and is our Android App of the Week – so what are you waiting for?

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

Recently I wrote that what makes RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) different from browser-native web applications isn’t rich functionality or rich content but rich design. Moreover I argued that only a player-based approach (effectively Flash/Flex or Silverlight/WPF) can provide the platform necessary to take web design to the next level.

As I expected, the feedback to the piece centred on the best way of blocking Flash content as it always does whenever I mention the technology. It’s hardly surprising as the first thing that comes to most people’s mind when you mention Flash is irritating banner ads specifically intended to distract you from reading the real content of the page – the absolute definition of bad design.

However in the context of a RIA, Flash/Flex is capable of so much more – producing an end user experience that the browser alone can never hope to match…

To begin with, it’s important to realise that Flash/Flex isn’t inherently “flashy” – it’s up to the designer how they put the platform to use and any decent designer knows that less is usually more.

In fact one of the great strengths of a player-based approach is the smooth and sophisticated streamlining it enables. While technologies like AJAX have allowed browser-based design to paper over the inherently page-based nature of HTML content, this just isn’t an issue for a player. At its best, the browser can offer extraordinary functionality but this will always feel clunky compared to a player-based application – just compare Google Docs to Adobe Buzzword to see the difference in action. Ultimately only the player-based RIA can deliver a truly desktop-style experience.

The design strengths of the player don’t just add to functionality; they are crucial when it comes to dealing with content. Here CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has worked wonders for the browser enabling it to graft on layout and typographic control to the presentation-neutral HTML, but this is still rudimentary. The difference between the browser and player is made clear when you access the New York Times website and then read the same content via the AIR-based Times Reader application (there’s a free taster version).

At first they might look pretty similar – apart from little things such as the live crossword and the fact that the whole reading experience is tighter and more enjoyable and works offline. The most fundamental difference is hidden unless you happen to resize the application. If you do, you’ll see that the layout automatically updates in real time – increase the application width and the columns will widen and then at the tipping point of comfortable reading another column will appear and any images will intelligently resize themselves accordingly.

Of course this adaptive layout isn’t really intended for such resizing on-the-fly (though it is quite addictive). The real purpose of adaptive layout is to ensure that whatever device you are accessing content by – mobile, notebook, desktop, TV or projector – the layout and design and so end experience are optimised. This isn’t a question of flashy bells-and-whistles it’s absolutely fundamental: it’s automatic and universal good design for any device that supports the Flash player.

As we move on from the early days of the Web, from simple desktop-based browsing to advanced desktop-style reading and doing, the time has come to stop dismissing Flash as just an irritating distraction. Thanks to its adaptive layout capabilities, Flash/Flex sets a new benchmark for the best possible cross-platform cross-device design.

Surely you wouldn’t want to block that?

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar:

I actually think it looks better that way, as the address/search bar to me is part of the tab I’m using, not a distinct element that works over all the tabs. But then I’m one of the few people who use Google Chrome as my main browser, and if you look at Chrome’s current design it’s easy to see why I like that Firefox layout.

Look familiar?

You can see more of the Firefox 4 mockups over on Mozilla’s wiki page, and there’s an interesting point near the bottom about the thinking behind some of the designs.

“I guess the idea of having a combined go/refresh button is good. It will help the users who are just switching from IE.”

I’ve been noticing for a while now that all the main browser designs seem to be converging, and this comment adds weight to that. If this is the way the designers are thinking, give it another year and Microsoft’s EU browser troubles will be irrelevant – they’ll all look the same.

Porn/Private Browsing

Most other browsers already had this feature, and now Firefox does too. With nothing more than a quick Ctrl+Shift+P your tabs will be whisked away and stored safely, leaving you with a fresh window for your… personal research.

When you’re all finished up, the same shortcut will bring back all your previous tabs and send all trace of your secret session into oblivion (it does not erase feelings of guilt).

It works perfectly well, but has a slightly annoying habit of clearing any half-filled forms – like the previous, unsaved incarnation of this blog post. Still, Mozilla has to leave room for improvement, or there would be nothing for them to do between now and version 4.0.

Video/Audio tags

One of the biggest features is support for the video and audio tags from HTML 5. The video tag is the one that will change your browsing experience most of all, because the web is littered with moving images.

It allows clips to be embedded straight into a site, with none of this flash-player nonsense. It’s a very powerful tag; rotating video, adding effects and even green-screen graphics can all be done on-the-fly. Try it out here, if you have a compatible browser. Firefox 3.5, for example.

Speedy JavaScript

The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine at the core of 3.5 is supposed to give other current browsers a run for their money. I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark twice on each of the common browsers, and took an average.

The chart above shows that Safari, Firefox and Chrome are all roughly on a par – although, if you want to get picky, Safari is the quickest of the bunch. Opera is sadly left behind, and IE is, well, consistent.

Final update

The last update of note is up there, in the top left of this post. The new logo. The same as the old logo, but a little shinier. Which pretty much sums up the whole browser, really.

Fast-forward four and half years and guess what? Google Mail, as it’s now known, still has that little BETA label under it, and it shows no sign of buggering off.

Over at the Royal Pingdom they’ve gone through the whole Google catalog and counted the applications that are in beta today. While 22 out of 49 may sound reasonable – Google is always coming up with innovations, after all – when you realise that these include Google Mail, Docs, and Product Search, you have to wonder if Google interprets the word beta in the same way as the rest of us.

The chaps over at Network World thought exactly the same thing, so they put it to Google: what exactly does beta mean to your product development cycle? The answer says a lot about how online computing is changing the way we go about things.

“We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product.  On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available.  Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed.  Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.”

So Google’s online products are constantly evolving things, that much is obvious to anyone who’s used them – but by this logic those beta labels won’t ever be removed. In ten years time Google Mail (BETA) will be the most complete in-progress software available, and Chrome (BETA) will still be the new kid on the block next to the arthritic Internet Explorer 18 and Firefox XIII.

Maybe it’s a perception thing, with Google afraid of looking like one of the boring mainstream. Or perhaps it just likes the cushion those beta labels afford it should anything go wrong. Either way, Google’s own NeverEnding Story is beginning to get a little bit silly.