| Eric at Lucii.org on 6 Apr 2014 07:28:52 -0700 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Alternate Browsers Survey |
In his original post Casey indicated that he found Chrome's interface "too weird." Casey: I, too, found Chrome's interface unusual but I've grown to love it. Now, I group Mozilla Firefox in the same "usability bucket" with IE (sorry Mozilla folks - I recognize that the Microsoft IE folks copied *you*.) In most Linux user interfaces I've used you can right click on the top row (where the tabs are) and select "Use System Title Bars and Borders." That may speed your transition into being a Chrome aficionado :-) Eric On 04/06/2014 09:38 AM, K.S. Bhaskar wrote: > Perhaps I missed it in your original post, but why is chromium not on your list? I too uise rekonq from time to time, and I agree that it's a decent browser, although not the fastest. konqueror is also a usable browser, even though it also pretends to be a file manager, and what I mostly use it for is viewing PDFs, since I can open a PDF in a tab from a shell command, something that okular does not permit. > > Regards > -- Bhaskar > > > On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org <mailto: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 <http://www.NerdWorld.org> > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > > > > -- > Windows does to computers what smoking does to humans > > > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- # Eric Lucas # # "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth # And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings... # -- John Gillespie Magee Jr ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug