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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.
I guess slashcode still doesn't include a spellchecker.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
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
The Mozilla version shipping with Mandrake 8.0 is 0.8.7. While stability is pretty much unchanged since then, Mozilla has gotten noticably faster during the 0.9.x cycle. 0.9.1 is usable on a 350 Mhz Pentium II... sort of. 0.9.3, while still being slower than Navigator 4.77, isn't bad at all. It's finally fast enough that I can use it as my normal, day-to-day browser (I was using Nav 4.77, because while it was unstable as hell, at least I didn't have to wait 20 seconds for a page to load).
I imagine that simliar situations are true for at least one or two of the other browsers compared. Development on Mozilla, especially, is happening very fast and comparing something current 6 months ago is not, IMHO particularly meaningful.
A German magazine did a similar thing a while ago, only they included MSIE. It won hands on in every discipline from speed to adherence to standards.
A pity that it wasn't at least mentioned.
Censorship on Slashdot
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...
why oh why where text only browsers not included ?
is this because their user base is small ?
I personally use it but I find that alot of people dont
because I find lynx the fall back GOD the page doent render in netscape or some fool has FSCK the HTML I just use lynx and away I go
really how much information (I am intrested in )is presented in pictures on the web
not much I am sure
lynx is my fallback king (-;
I use it when I telnet into places to check they can see stuff plus all I need is a telnet app which I can obtain for most OS's
what do you relie on to ALWAYS give you the web ?
(me its a telnet client and lynx)
regards
john jones
*CmdrTaco loads images.google.com*
*CmdrTaco types in "tux the penguin nude"*
*Penguin loads up in goatse position*
CmdrTaco: hmmmm....
*CmdrTaco types in "RMS nude"*
*Google locks...*
CmdrTaco: ^$%$#@!
Execute? [Y/N] _
The Winner [for "The Look"]: Mozilla, hands down. It's terrific that someone decided to take the route away from the greys.
Oh goody. I was tired of all my applications looking the same and behaving the same. I love guessing which color means disabled for each different application. I like having my system wide colors that I've carefully chosen to minimize eye strain thrown out the window.
System wide colors and looks are feature. If you're sick of living in grey land, change it globally. Gnome supports this. KDE supports this. Windows supports this.
Mozilla is a great browser, but their decision to roll their own user interface was a mistake. Fortunately Mozilla is modular, and as the core engine stabilizes I plan on moving to a more system friendly browser using that engine. Probably Galeon or Skipstone.
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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
There's an IE 5/WINE howto at:
http://www.hardcorelinux.com/wine-howto.htm
which shows you how to run IE 5 in Linux. Someone wrote me recently stating v5.5 doesn't work w/ the command-line parameters i used, but I know personally circa 5.0 does. It works decently too, rendering pages nearly as well as the Windows counterpart.
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