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Sleipnir, created in 2002 by Fenrir inc's Yasuyuki Kashiwagi, is a Japan-based browser boasting ultracustomization. Apart from the ability to customize aesthetics such as the design and skin of the interface, Sleipnir provides 13 different plug-ins to choose from. Among these, the option that stands out is the ActiveGeckoBrowser plug-in, which allows users to switch between the default Trident (Internet Explorer's rendering engine) and Mozilla's Gecko. This is useful when different sites behave differently based on the engine; simply click the Explorer icon at the bottom of the screen and it will automatically switch to Gecko. Note that when using Sleipnir on the Gecko engine, a warning message will occasionally appear for security purposes, stating that information is about to be sent over an unencrypted connection.

Though this feature is useful, changing the engine does not improve Sleipnir's sluggish feel; the browser is significantly slower than others, occasionally freezing when many tabs are being used simultaneously. In simple timer-tests using Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, Sleipnir's average cold start-up time on the Trident engine was 9.3 seconds, warm start-up was 2.99s, and navigating time was 2.02s (from nytimes.com to facebook.com). On the Gecko engine these metrics were 10.31s, 2.71s, and 1.68s, respectively. Compare this with Internet Explorer 7's times of 4.99s, 2.32s, and 1.59s, and Mozilla Firefox' times 5.83s, 1.35s, and .81s, respectively. Though these speeds show that Sleipnir is "slower" than the more-well-known browsers it is based on, Sunspider JavaScript benchmark testing yielded less-consistent results.

On the Trident engine, Sleipnir received an average score of 50,762 milliseconds, whereas Internet Explorer got 56,816ms in our tests, meaning that Sleipnir has faster JavaScript performance. However, on the Gecko engine, the results showed that Mozilla Firefox (1,680ms) was significantly faster than Sleipnir (21,502ms). The CSS rendering test, which measures the time it takes the browser to render a page consisting of almost 2,500 positioned DIVs, was more consistent with our timer results. Sleipnir received 33.3ms on the Trident engine and 57.3ms on Gecko, whereas Internet Explorer received 31.3ms and Mozilla Firefox received 16ms.

In addition to Internet Explorer's standard toolbar, Sleipnir adds four different tab-viewing options and extra toolbar space, making the icon-heavy user interface feel slightly cluttered. However, this clutter may be considered positive considering the extra options Sleipnir includes: group, security, proxy, script, and window menus are included in the toolbar in addition to Internet Explorer menus. These extra options allow the user to do things such as open a specific category of recent pages simultaneously (i.e., news pages), adding/reloading scripts, controlling windows/tabs, etc. On the bottom of the screen there are buttons for muting sound, stopping images and videos, and others, such as stopping ActiveX control. Note that these bottom options only work when Sleipnir is running on the Trident engine.

The name Sleipnir comes from Odin's majestic eight-legged horse in Nordic mythology. Unlike the name--which means "smooth" and "gliding"--suggests, Sleipnir is anything but graceful. Advanced Web users will enjoy the detailed customization, but those who are looking for a fast and simple Internet experience should stick to their practical four-legged browser.

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