Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Browse the Web from Your Wrist with µBrowser Josh Centers Have you ever looked down at your Apple Watch and thought, 'I wish I could browse the Web from my wrist!' OK, probably not. But now you can anyway, thanks to the $0.99 [1]µBrowser from developer Arno Appenzeller, who specializes in fun and cheap little utilities like [2]PiPifier and [3]TV Maps. (Given its use of the Greek letter mu, which is the abbreviation for SI prefix 'micro,' µBrowser should probably be pronounced 'microBrowser,', but most people will probably call it 'ubrowser.' Just don't search for 'ubrowser' in the App Store because that will pull up multiple apps with that name that are not µBrowser. It's all Greek to me! But if you want to type a mu character on the Mac, it's Option-M.) Acknowledging µBrowser's Limitations µBrowser actually works pretty well on the tiny Apple Watch screen, despite the fact that nearly every site'including ours, sorry!'now has a largely pointless cookie notice you have to tap through that obscures the entire screen until you do. Once you get past that, the ''TidBITS site renders faithfully. Some sites with custom fonts, like Daring Fireball, do not, but even then Daring Fireball doesn't look terrible. Other than the custom font quirk and the tiny screen, the main annoyance is that you must tap through a 'Sign In' prompt every single time you load a website, even though you're not signing into anything. Arno explains during µBrowser setup that this is an Apple requirement, and you're not actually handing over any personal information when you do this. Hopefully, Apple eliminates this requirement soon. There are other limitations as well. Arno warns that µBrowser may have trouble with JavaScript and large Web pages. Also, don't expect to be able to log into most online services with µBrowser. Navigating the Web from Your Wrist On the main µBrowser screen, there are three ways to navigate to a website: URL, DuckDuckGo search, and bookmarks. As you might imagine, typing URLs on the Apple Watch screen is frustrating'tap the globe button to start entering a URL. Given that I wear an Apple Watch Series 4, I'm forced to use Scribble, unlike Series 7 owners who can employ a full keyboard. But I'm not sure even that would be much better. You can instead use voice dictation, which works well for most sites, like 'twitterdotcom,' but forget trying to navigate to 'slashdotdotorg' that way (it will type out /..org). Caption: Left: Tap the globe to enter a URL or the magnifying glass to search DuckDuckGo. The previous URL or search term remains until you change it. Right: entering a URL. However, voice dictation works well with µBrowser's search function, which you activate by tapping the magnifying glass on the main screen. I also discovered that at some point, Apple made it so you can enter text on the Apple Watch with your iPhone, much like you've been able to do with the Apple TV for some time. That's a neat feature but seems to defeat the point of browsing from your Apple Watch. Arno's solution to the problem of typing URLs is µBrowser's iPhone companion app, which lets you create bookmarks that sync to your Apple Watch. I'm not sure how useful µBrowser is, but I've gotten a buck of fun from it. Plus, there are times it could be handy, particularly on a cellular-enabled Apple Watch with no iPhone available. References Visible links 1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/%C2%B5browser/id1590622755 2. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier/id1234771095 3. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tv-maps/id1075622390 Hidden links: 4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/12/ubrowser.jpeg 5. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/12/uBrowser-prompt.jpeg 6. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/12/uBrowser-URL-search.jpeg 7. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/12/Type-on-watch-with-iPhone.jpeg 8. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/12/uBrowser-Companion.jpeg .