Linux: Browser Wars
Anderson Silva writes "LinuxToday has an article doing a pretty basic comparison on some of the major linux browsers. Although a nice article, and with a fair result, I still think Opera is the best browser available for Linux." I prefer knoqueror, although recent builds seem to have random hangs on images.google.com.
The author says Opera is clean and simple. In my eyes, Opera is horrible. It's default screen is covered with 500 different widgets. When you load a page, they all start whizzing and moving around. It's very distracting. Opera doesn't look at home on GNOME nor KDE, which just adds to its problems. Opera, with its adverts and grotesque widgets, is a visual insult.
Slashdot uses a lot of tables on the pages which can take a while to render, so what better test for a browser. Obviously this is a pretty extreme test as most pages are nowhere near as big.
Opera: 127 seconds
Konqueror: 57 seconds
Mozilla: 71 seconds
Galeon: 64 seconds
Skipstone: 57 seconds (Note: Browser crashed on first attempt.)
Netscape: 34 seconds
Winner: Netscape Navigator
These load times are absurd. Is this guy connected to the internet via a 300-baud phone-coupler attached to a telephone line spliced together with paper clips? I'm on a cablemodem, and it takes less than two-seconds to fully load slashdot. I think it took about 9 or 10 when I was on a dialup. Anyone else think these figures look a little inflated?
when salmon are outlawed, only outlaws will have salmon
I'm using Galeon to read this right now 0.11.0, and while it's a really nice, clean interface, it does have some problems.
. htm
:)
http://ska.about.com/library/cannabis/blccrolling
This is one of them. One of the two pop ups on this page crash it EVERY time. Without fail. I warn you, do not visit this in Galeon (unless there is some way of turning pop-ups off, which is entirely possible, I've never really delved too deep into it's guts.
But I like it MUCH better than Mozilla and Netscape. It just seems cleaner to me.
And for those of you visiting that web site in non Galeon browers, I did eventually figure out how to roll a joint without its help
Verloc
From the article: Konqueror: Clean, simple and boring. Perfectly functional, with the bare minimum of fuss. The spinning KDE logo in the corner looks very nice, but of course adds nothing to your browsing experience.
Konqueror, boring? Gimme a break. It's completely themable and it doesn't even need its own themes like Mozilla, you can use general KDE themes. And it works wonderfully as a file manager (and network browser and PDF and manpage viewer), with smooth icon previews of HTML, ps, pdf, images and text files. You can split the view in however many sub-windows you want, you can even have a shell prompt as a subwindow. It has a full screen mode. Right now, I'm browsing with KDE and Konqueror in "Aqua" theme and it looks, well, let's just say you have to buy an Apple if you want something to look cooler than that.
And what's up with testing on a ridiculously outdated machine? P166, no MMX, 32 MB RAM? You've gotta be kidding me. If I wanted a browser that worked fast on this configuration, I'd have stuck with Netscape 3.0...
I had to do a Browser comparison with an application which needed hiding and displaying parts of a web page: depending on what you clicked some different stuff appeared.
This application uses a lot of features a browser can handle: stylesheets (and the nasty "display" attribute), JavaScript, tables, forms and XML.
I tried the following browsers (under Windows, since the people who will use it mainly have Windows):
Netscape 4.x
Netscape 6.1
Internet Explorer 5.x
Opera 5.12
Amaya 5.1
Mozilla 0.9.3
Here are the results:
- IE kicked ass in everything, and even displayed the XML stuff right.
- NS 6.1 kicked ass too, but 6 or 7 times slower. Prettier display, but hideously slow (and no XML, but we didn't care). Same thing for Mozilla (duh).
- NS 4.x sucked. Couldn't handle the "display: none" property properly. No XML.
- Opera faked kicking ass, but in fact had JavaScript problems... just wouldn't show anything whatever you clicked. No XML.
-Amaya didn't even fake. I guess it was a JavaScript problem because the display of the object was weird. But it faked some XML. displayed the source as plain text (ohh it's displaying something!! no, it's the source)
Conclusion: best results on Win: (sniff) IE. Followed by NS6.1 and Mozilla. Then comes Opera.
Gotta try some browsers under Mac and Linux now too, maybe.
E
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