iOS/Android: I hate mobile browsing. When I open Safari, I’m usually trying to google something quickly, then go back to my other apps. Lately I’ve been trying the mobile browser Cake, publicly released for iOS and Android today, and it’s made searching much faster.
Cake is built around search and tactile browsing. Its home screen is topped with a big fat search bar and includes five brightly colored search buttons for video, image, web, news, and shopping results. (You can also just type in a URL like a normal address bar.)
On most mobile browsers, a search takes you to a list of search results, where you have to tap again to get to an actual result. But Cake takes you right to the first result. You can swipe right for the next one, or left for the usual results page. Cake loads them all in the background, and cleans them up with an optional ad blocker. But if Google actually has a great custom results page for your search term, Cake will notice and deliver you to the usual results page first.
If you use image search, you’ll get Google’s typical results page, but you can swipe for results from Giphy, Bing, Flickr, Imgur, and a few stock photo sites. Video search takes you to YouTube, or swipe for Google video results, Vimeo, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. News search works like normal search but for news results; shopping uses Google Shopping, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other stores. You can customize all these tabs, hiding or re-ordering them, but you can’t add new ones.
If you search as often as I do, these changes are enough to make you put Cake on your home screen. Cake doesn’t try to replace your default browser for in-app links; it’s just for times when you open the browser app intentionally. You can see that as a feature or a bug.
There are a few annoyances. If you enable notifications, Cake sends messages asking you to put it on your home screen, even if you already have. And the browser doesn’t yet have a find-in-page function. That’s a weird gap for a search-oriented app, but unless that’s a dealkiller, Cake is the best mobile browser for searching.
Cake web browser | Android/iOS download page