Floating Browser Flux! for Android allows windowed web browsing over other applications
Floating Browser Flux! is an Android application that allows you to pop open a browser window and have it accessible over almost any other application. While it’s not particularly geared toward phone-sized devices, it does come in handy on my HTC EVO 4G LTE when I attempt to use it as “the device.” It features a nearly full set of things you can do, and I’m fairly certain it’s the stock browser embedded into the device, so everything I’ve thrown at it just works.
When you’re not using it or need more screen space, you can minimize it to the task bar, or just resize the thing so that it’s out of your line of view. You can open multiple windows if you need to do some serious side by side research, or maximize the one you’re in to get a normal experience.
Whether or not you want the browser floating, it’s quite useful to have it always in memory and selectable. While using the recent-apps buttons or selections are useful, many times the browser will have been purged from the device’s memory by an overly aggressive task killer.
One thing to note is that if you’re on a device with very little free memory, keeping a browser open might cause application hangs and crashes. Solutions to this are either free more memory using a task killer, or use fewer Floating Browser Flux! windows.
As for bugs, I’ve noticed a couple of times that the stock keyboard on my phone tends to have issues attempting to enter data into forms or text boxes on a page, but that has been cleared up every time by tapping the address bar and tapping back down in the form. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s not a huge deal.
Floating Browser Flux! is free, contains no ads, comes in at only 336K, has about the most straightforward permissions requests of any app I’ve seen, and it’s just pretty darn cool.
Download: Google Play
