Chinese High School Student Develops iOS Browser

While Chinese copycats usually make more headlines, its important to remember that there are some amazing talents in China creating equally amazing work. A 19-year-old teenager, who goes by the name of Peakji, has already developed lots of excellent software, most notably Mammoth 4, an impressive mobile browser which won the top award at Macworld Asia.

As it was made by a senior school student, Mammoth 4 has a very distinctive design and user’s experience. The interface of Mammoth 4 is so concise that you can only see a slide bar in the bottom. Most operations can be done by one finger sliding: switching tabs by sliding the bottom bar, reloading or dismissing tabs, visiting your favorite pages by sliding your finger up.

Mammoth has lots of interesting functions like private browsing mode, an ad-blocking feature, Twitter and so on. We talked to the prodigous young developer to find out more about him and his new browser.

How long did you take to develop the Mammoth browser?

The 4th series of the Mammoth browser was released yesterday. The series began last August. During the period, it kept updating rapidly. In order to guarantee the quality, every major version number is rewritten completely.

The functions of the first version is quite simple, just testing whether users accept the operation mode or not. So it took only a month to launch. The second major version (2.0.0) began to integrate a multi-tab system and launched by the end of 2010. The third major version formed a more complete style. But at that time, I was in my last year of high school. It released in March and it had a lot of flaws. After the collage entrance exam, I devote myself to the development of Mammoth 4. All the codes, designs, and images were reset. This took three months.

Why did you develop Mammoth 4?

The reason is quite simple. Just because I felt multi-tabbed browsing at the time was limited. There was a lot of room for improvement in user experience. So I treated myself as a user, and developed a browser from the angle of a user’s demand. That is the reason why Mammoth is so welcomed widely by users.

From the market, there are three kinds of browsers: Native, third-party paid, and third party free. The native only has basic functions, not enough to serve enthusiasts. The third-party paid browsers are usually developed by small companies, lacking user experience. All depend on advertising, deeply damaging user experience and lacking in personality. So there is lots of room in the market for Mammoth.