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A Bangalore based company Hidden Reflex has developed what it calls the world’s first browser for Indians. Epic, as the browser is called, has social networking widgets, email clients and chat clients pre-installed.

It’s Indian because it allows the user to type in 12 Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bangla, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gurmukhi and even Sanskrit. It has over 1500 Indian themes and wallpapers. It also claims it has 1500- plus sidebar applications, in addition to the 10,000 or so Firefox applications that are already compatible since both Epic and Firefox are based on the same Mozilla open source platform.

Perhaps the developers also believe that Indian web users are a bunch of lazy mouse potatoes. Why else would you make all virus scanning automatic? But jokes apart, the look of the browser is pretty neat. It is quick to download and installs fairly without any hassle.

It has a clean look and although it claims it downloads web pages the fastest, our initial reaction was that it is as fast (or slow) as Firefox. ,Banner ads rendering on pages is a problem. For instance, the top banner ad never got displayed in the time we tested the browser. Which, come to think of it, is not really a bad thing because users can now ignore banner ads completely and concentrate on content. The site publishers may not be okay with that though.

But what is really impressive about the browser is that its email and chat and social media widgets open in a window on the left of the main browser window so that you can carry on with your work and keep an eye open for a chat message or a new email on the left. I thought it would be obtrusive, but it is not really. I quite like this feature.

Download the browser from http://www.epicbrowser.com/.

On the whole, Epic is a more than just a decent attempt — and although it is certainly not India’s first indigenous browser, it looks to be the “ country’s” most impressive so far.