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Linux: Browser Wars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-never-ends dept.

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.

3 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. loading slashdot?... by gkuchta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Gimme a break... by quartz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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    And what's up with testing on a ridiculously outdated machine?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...

  3. Windows: Browser wars by imevil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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