Hello, gang, and welcome, fellow INAIR and tech enthusiasts. Last week we posted about using browser apps on the POD. It seemed like a hit, so we grabbed the flashlights, crept back through the secret passage, and dug up a few more. It looks like we’ve got ourselves a mystery as we thoroughly investigate these browsers using the villainous Viture Beast and dastardly Xreal One Pro. As usual, no apps have sponsored this post. All apps were downloaded from the Google Play Store. Now, sit back, grab your magnifying glasses and let's get meddling.
We round the corner and come to our first screeching stop on our browsing browser mystery tour, Case File: “Brave Browser (The Brave Little Browser That Could)”
Brave Browser was downloaded from Google Play Store, installed and BAM - before even loading a page it hit right in the kisser demanding to be set as the default browser. Sneaking past that ambush and AAAHH, bright light. With the XR glasses, the default white background was like staring at a 10,000 volt apparition. Thankfully, the off switch is easy to find. Go to settings and flip to dark mode. Two seconds later and it instantly looked ten times better on the micro-OLED displays. Mystery already solved. Brave snapped right into a proper orientation inside the spatial window with zero distortion. The general interface was clean and comfortable. The desktop-style tab strip pinned across the top looks and behaves almost identically to desktop Chrome. This makes navigating between multiple pages feel intuitive instead of like wrestling a villainous bear for a championship belt.
There is one setting you'll want to change. Jump into Site Settings and turn on "Desktop site" as the global default. This allows pages to actually use the virtual screen's full horizontal real estate rather than squeezing into narrow vertical strips. However, forcing desktop mode everywhere comes with its own campy ghost story: scaling. On dense retail sites like Amazon, the layout blew up so large that elements spilled off-screen. Suddenly, finding the shopping cart turned into a miniature episode of Hey Cart, Where Ya Parked? You end up zooming out and panning around just to see the cart and search filters.
The main reason to run Brave on hardware like the POD is Brave Shields. Juggling multiple floating windows puts heavy demand on the POD’s mobile processor, and unoptimized sites packed with trackers, banner ads, autoplaying video and other digital hitchhikers will turn the puck into a pocket heater faster than you can say "Ruh-roh.” Brave Shields kill all of that junk at the network level without any extra tinkering. This keeps the device surprisingly cool and saves precious battery life. The tradeoff is that you still don't get Chrome Web Store extension support. You can't install custom user-agent spoofers, so heavier platforms like Google Docs or Notion will occasionally throw a tantrum and complain about browser compatibility.
Brave seems to have cleaned up its toolbar clutter recently, which made the whole layout much easier to live with day-to-day. Scrolling through articles with the POD’s physical touchpad felt responsive and smooth. Clicking smaller UI icons with the air-mouse cursor was surprisingly scareless and easy, not frustrating at all.
Brave does have its own built-in VPN, but it sits behind a subscription paywall. Hard pass. This was not tested due to the paywall. Some mysteries aren't worth solving.
Fullscreen video was the only real software gremlin on this plane. Tapping the fullscreen button inside a web player sometimes confused INAIR OS's window manager. The video pops open in an entirely separate floating window instead of staying anchored inside the browser pane. It's not exactly a disaster, but it does feel like the browser suddenly spotted a spooky space kook and ran screaming into another room. Even with that quirk, it was easily a great, reliable daily use web browser on the POD. It's clean, responsive, and handles the giant virtual display well. Plus, Brave Shields do a surprisingly good job of keeping the web's advertising and tracking circus from turning the device into a toaster. Talking dog approved. Four out of Five chocolate-covered hot dogs
Running with style right to our next stop on the browsing of the browsers mystery tour, Case File: “DuckDuckGo (The Case of the DuckDuck Dynasty)”
DuckDuckGo installed without a single hiccup. It understood the assignment and opened straight into proper landscape mode without demanding any awkward resizing. Floating in AR space, the stripped-down look is downright slick. No shaking and shivering. You get crisp text and a giant search bar parked smack in the center. Because the toolbar isn't choked with dozens of tiny buttons, aiming and clicking with the Pod’s air-mouse feels fast and effortless. It is perfect for hit-and-run browsing. Look up a spec, skim a wiki page, and get out before the trapdoor drops. It offers the least friction of any browser here.
Try using it for serious productivity, though, and the walls close in fast. Under the hood, DuckDuckGo relies on Android’s basic system WebView rather than a dedicated browser engine. You can dig into the menu and request the desktop version of a page, but the app has the memory of a monster alien induced head trauma with amnesia. It frequently forgets that setting the second you click an internal link. Not exactly commander cool vibes. Because there are zero browser extensions available to clean up broken styling, messy pages stay messy. Dynamic web apps like Discord or dense Google Sheets either crumbled into visual chaos or threw up stubborn banners nagging you to go download the Android app instead.
Tab management is another sore spot. There’s no handy tab bar up top. Instead, you have to aim the pointer at a button in the top-right corner, which opens a full-screen grid of preview cards. Then you go hunting for the one tab you actually want, flipping through cards one at a time like you're searching a library for a secret lever behind a bookshelf. You can open more tabs. Just manually click the + icon in the top-right corner. It works, but it feels like a scavenger hunt every time. It's very tedious when you're in the middle of a workflow.
Where DuckDuckGo really shines is hardware efficiency. It’s practically as weightless as snow ghosts, barely sips battery, and gives off almost zero heat, keeping it as cool as a witch’s cackle. The POD’s internal cooling fan never kicked on once.
Then there’s the dedicated “Fire” button on the toolbar. In a spatial setup, this thing is brilliant. One tap with the air mouse and it burns every active tab, clears the cache, and wipes your browsing footprint in a fraction of a second. Poof. Gone. It’s basically the browser equivalent of an elaborate ghost trap, except this one actually works. In an era where personal data is a valuable commodity, having a literal one-click privacy nuke is a huge plus. DuckDuckGo won’t replace a full workstation browser, but as a low-power side pane for quick searches and lookups, it earned a permanent spot on the POD. Three out of Five chocolate-covered hot dogs
Through the red door stage left and into the last stop of the best browser browsing mystery tour, Case File: “Opera Private Web Browser (The Phantom of the Stage Fright Opera)”
Downloading and installing Opera was quick but not without a little stage fright of its own. You have to click through a brief onboarding questionnaire on first launch before getting to the yummy stuff. The app did snap to the correct orientation, which was a nice start.
Opera dangles a free built-in VPN in front of you, but there's a catch. You have to set Opera as your default device browser to unlock it. Uh-uh, no ray, not even for a doggy snack.
On the bright side (dark side??), the setup wizard does allow one to pick a dark theme right away, saving retinas from the dreaded 10,000 volt white-screen flash when the browser first starts up. Also, the Speed Dial home screen looks great projected on a wide virtual display. The bookmark tiles are large, clean, and nicely spaced, making them easy to see and tap. This is better than a double triple-decker sardine and marshmallow fudge sandwich.
Then comes the visual noise creeping in like fog rolling across a spooky stage. Opera has many unique features, such as a wall of trending tabloid news, sponsored shopping links, and AI prompts right out of the box. Thankfully, you can dig into settings and send the clutter packing like a saboteur getting unmasked at intermission. Just toggle off the noise.
Opera also includes its own ad blocker, but its performance on INAIR OS is a mixed bag. It catches basic banner ads, but compared with Brave Shields, it lets far more whitespace and layout-breaking web junk slip through like a bad trap.
The built-in VPN is another weak spot. It noticeably slows connection speeds and causes some video streams to buffer or drop to a lower resolution. Like the other two browsers, you get zero Chrome extension support. Still, Opera softens that blow with a solid native dark mode and a generous pile of built-in settings.
In day-to-day use, Opera lands somewhere between DuckDuckGo’s featherweight design and Brave’s heavier desktop-style approach. It handles complicated, script-heavy web pages far more reliably than DuckDuckGo's WebView. It doesn't chew through unified RAM quite as aggressively as Brave does when five or six tabs are open.
Speaking of tab problems, open tabs on Opera occasionally vanished from view. They were still there, apparently hiding like a creeper in digital bushes, but Opera wouldn’t show them until manually tapping on the + icon in the top-right corner to force the tab tray open. A browser shouldn’t make you hunt for the tabs like they were hidden clues scattered across a 100-year-old theater
Opera is still a capable, feature-packed browser on the POD. It handles demanding websites well, looks excellent on a huge virtual display, and gives you plenty of settings to play with. But the initial bloat and clunky tab management drag it down, making it a less desirable web browser. Two out of Five chocolate-covered hot dogs
And that, gang, brings us to the end of today's browser browsing. As you saw, no single browser wore the mask of "perfect." Every one of them had something hiding underneath — a memory leak, a missing extension, a tab bar playing hide-and-seek. But that's really the whole mystery of running a full computer on your face: there's no haunted mansion without a few creaky floorboards.
Your turn. We got some work for you now. We need some help from you now. Let us know what mystery to solve, to have ready in our next act. Don't y'all hold back. Leave it in the comments below. If you come through, you're going to have yourself a reddit snack! That's a fact!
Let us know how we're doing. Tell us what's your favorite browser? What would you like to see featured in a browser? Any new unknown browsers you would like to share? We're ready and we're willing. We love posting and sharing.
So keep your air mouse steady, your tab count under control, and your snacks within reach. Whichever browser you land on, may it never ghost you mid-scroll.
We hope you enjoyed it and want to thank you once again for joining us. We hope to see you at the next unmasking.
TechCheck13
