Re: [PLUG] Alternate Browsers Survey

On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:

Here are the non-Mozilla alternative browsers I tried, and the results I got.
All these browser are available in the standard Gentoo package library, and
presumably in all the other major distro libraries. My overall conclusions are
listed at the end.

dwb
http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

Very spartan interface. Confusing to the layman. This might be a really cool
browser, but it will take quite a bit of learning to make it work well.

Dillo
http://www.dillo.org/

Would not compile on my Gentoo system unless I disabled the cairo graphics
library. Produced a very primitive, butt-ugly output that sometimes wildly
mis-rendered web pages.

Epiphany
http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/

A gnome-based browser, so building it on my KDE-Gentoo system pulled in lots
of extra stuff. The results were very disappointing. Maybe I'm missing
something by not being a gnome fan, but I couldn't even see where to set a
default opening page.

Midori
http://www.midori-browser.org/

Not too bad. Nicely responsive. Able to open new tabs in home page instead
of the dreaded "speed dial". Crashed frequently when opening the settings
menu item on my ~AMD64 Gentoo system. (I presume this particular to my Gentoo
system, and a "normal" distro would not have problems.)

Only downside is that I could not customize the toolbar.

Netsurf
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Very quick. Menu items names (all of them!) were preceded by "gtk", so the
toolbar listed "gtkFile", "gtkEdit", etc commands). I did not use this
browser because it sometimes wildly mis-rendered web pages. Too bad actually,
because I liked the responsiveness.

This one is probably worth coming back to to see if I can trouble-shoot the
mis-rendering.

Opera
http://www.opera.com/

Worked great, but closed source.

QupZilla
http://www.qupzilla.com/

Very good. Smaller memory footprint than Mozilla, but just as full-featured.
I like how I can open a new tab in my home page instead of being forced to
open "speed dial". I also liked the ability to change the look with Themes.

CupZilla tended to lock up on me sometimes on my desktop machine. I presume
this is a bug in the basic bleeding-edge Webkit-gtk library in Gentoo, but of
course, don't know for sure. It has never locked up on another Gentoo Pentium
3 system I use.

The only drawback I see is that I can't customize the toolbar and rearrange
things like I could in Mozilla.

Rekonq
http://rekonq.kde.org/

Beautiful! A KDE-friendly browser that is fun, fast, and customizable. At
first, I couldn't use it though because all the ads got through! (Wow, I
didn't realize how much nicer having an ad-blocker is.) Then I explored and
found ad-blocker on the tools.

The only downside is that I would like to have a menu bar, and I can't figure
out how to enable one in Rekonq.

My current favorite by far!

Surf
http://surf.suckless.org/

Makes dwb look luxurious in all it features. VERY simple, but nice if you
want absolutely bare bones.

Conclusions
I chose Rekonq for everyday browsing on my main KDE-based desktop (with lots
of memory, so KDE is fine). On my older laptops with only 500 MBytes of RAM, I
use Qupzilla on LXDE. It's full featured, but doesn't need as much overhead
as Firefox.

The other thing I noticed was how Firefox was not as innovative as the others.
Firefox has tons of ad-ons that the others lack, but the basic feature set of
Firefox was lacking. Specifically, Firefox forces you to open new tabs in the
"speed dial" mode, which I detest. Almost all the others offered speed dial,
but also offered to allow you to open new tabs in your home page. Also, the
others showed page loading progress bars that (as far as I can tell) Firefox
does not.

--

Casey Bralla

Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation

www.NerdWorld.org
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--
Windows does to computers what smoking does to humans