An undated handout image of Mozilla's current Firefox browser.
An undated handout image of Mozilla's current Firefox browser. A new version of Mozilla's popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft Corp's dominant Internet Explorer. REUTERS/Mozilla/Handout Reuters

Cosmos is a web browser that does not need data connection to browse the internet. The browser was a novel idea of four college and high school students from the U.S. This team of students were able to create this browser in 36 hours. They have released a beta version that is available on the U.S. Play Store.

The working of the web browser is very unique. When a user enters a URL in the address bar of the browser, it is sent by an SMS to a web service that was made with Twilio and Node.JS. This will load the contents of the website and take away any scripts, images and CSS. It will also archive the minified version and send it back to the device through one or more text messages.

The app will now intercept the messages and reassemble the contents displaying the requested web page. As all these communication takes place via SMS there is no need for a data or internet connection.

The team behind the creation of the Cosmos web browser was able to make this working app and bring it to the Play Store in less than a month. They also warn that there are some bugs due to the fact that the app and backend system are in its infantile stage. Due to the limit of the cloud infrastructure users may find that the app sometimes may not be able to serve the site that was requested, especially if the contents, of the requested site is very large.

According to Android Authority, they tested the Cosmos and it failed to load the Android Authority or the Reddit front page. But they achieved success with simple pages from the Wikipedia. They stated on their website that this clearly shows that the Cosmos does work. However, pages take a long time to load and the user has to deal with a great deal of text notifications.

Cosmos is restricted to U.S. users to avoid overloading the infrastructure. This app could probably have an impact in places where the wireless internet connection is not stable.