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Linux Web Browsers Compared
Rob Valliere writes: "The best Linux Web browsers have dramatically improved in the past few months: they are all stable, standards compliant and loaded with solid feature enhancements and additions. Using Red Hat 7.2 and the KDE desktop, the premier Linux browsers are Galeon 1.0.3, Mozilla 0.9.8
and Opera 6.0 TP3. The best Web downloads and installs were from Opera and Mozilla, which have minimal dependencies. Galeon is a small download but can be difficult to upgrade due to its Mozilla and GNOME dependencies."
Someone forgot to mention Konqueror in the summarizing article...
And the version in KDE 3 betas is even better. It's the only Linux browser I know of which displays the ticker at the top of the BBC News website correctly. The others don't even try.
Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
They want you to buy it, after all.
They have to make money somehow!
You cheap bastard.
I'm using it on both a Windoze and Linux platform and I have to say that it is extremely fast, just like the slogan says. The program just feels lightweight the way it pops right up and "loads" all your pages instantly (ok so they're not always refreshed, but hey). Anyway, be sure to install the java lib with it under windows or you may have some problems there (at least I do sometimes) but under linux it doesn't seem to matter.
~ now you know
Another vote for Konqueror. I can't get any version of Netscape to run stably on a system at work. Version 6 hangs on a few pages I need to access, while Version 4 segfaults on one X display when another instance is started using a different X server to display. We use a browser to view our IDS logs, and multiple users need to have access. Segfaulting on each new unique display instance makes that hard.
Opera runs fine, but the display is not as good as Konqueror. I still use Lynx, but for what I use the browser at work, I have to have graphical. Looks like Konqueror is it for me.
RagManX
Since Mozilla 0.9.8 seems to keep crashing (0.9.6 seemed to me to be the peak of stability for the browser), I've been using Konqueror a lot more.
It does make me miss good Mozilla things, like tabbed browsing. I've also run into a number of pages that Konqueror does not handle all that well, but I'm not sure if its due to standards violations in those pages or in Konqueror.
I might be missing it, but I also can't find a way to do a text zoom in Konqueror!
Konqueror seems to be as fast as Opera at rendering pages (but no in-gui ads!). And, for the paranoid, it handles cookie requests as well as... Lynx!
And Konqueror doesn't have a ton of dependencies like Galeon or skipstone... (it just depends on the whole of KDE!)
Best of all, Konqueror is *just* a web browser, which is something all the other browser projects should come to terms with. I am never going to use Mozilla's mail client, their news reader, or their HTML editor. In fact, the inclusion of these items tends to slow me down when I accidentally invoke them.
Wouldn't these massive browser projects benefit greatly by focusing on only *one thing*, like making a nice, fast, stable, standards-compliant browser? Isn't that hard enough?
Lately, when I build Mozilla, I choose not to build those components, which speeds up the build process nicely!
I found the hability of displaying images with a transparent background and smooth borders a big plus. Right now, the only browsers I know of fully supporting the alpha channel on .png images are Mozilla and Opera 6; Konqueror trims the borders of the image. I don't know if Galeon support png/alpha channel, but given that it uses the Mozilla renderer (Gecko) it maybe does.
That is the biggest grip that I have about Konqueror; some effects on my home page display somewhat broken.
I surf a lot of pages in Japanese. While I've found Netscape sufficient for viewing Japanese (and other double-byte character set) language pages, I've often had trouble getting things like web forms to work (this is on the Linux version).
One of my biggest disappointments with Opera (which I last tried out about a year ago) was its lack of support for far eastern languages. I hear this has been resolved in newer versions.
BeOS's NetPositive actually worked the best for me as far as displaying and inputting Japanese.
Anyway, it would be nice if more of these "browser comparison" articles included internationalization (i18n) along with "speed," "standards compliance," "ease of installation", etc. as one of the features tested.
I don't understand why mozilla and friends get so much more attention to konqueror?! I've been using konqueror for over a year now and since i started using it I will never go back. It's:
-FASTER
-highly configurable
-smaller
-rarely crashes
-handles netscape plugins
-javascript will be fixed in kde3
-and handles crossover plugins so you can view quicktime videos if you want.
so WHY isnt' it mentioned in the article above? WTF.
no java, javascript, cookies, or any of that crap. so it's not good for everything, but when you just want fast access to stuff that is mostly text, or if you're trying to read a site that is too busy (maybe because it's slashdotted), it's a winner.
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
Lynx and links are good for console use. If you want a fast X browser (one that doesn't require 64 MB RAM + 450Mhz+ proc), dillo is quite good. I think it's the fastest graphical browser I've ever used.
Konq, Moz and friends are getting a little too fat and bloated for my tastes these days...:-(
Edge.
That sorts the men from the boys - CSS-wise anyway.
You might take a look at Dillo (http://dillo.sf.net) - it is small, fast, doesn't depend on mozilla, and generally makes a good fast browser. It is under development, but even so for what you describe it should work fine.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Dilo if you don't mind imperfect rendering (doesn't do frames yet).
If you don't mind having a text only interface, Lynx and Links are both good and surprisingly functional.
Of course fast does not necessarily imply best but it's a welcome addition.
When's the last time you tried to instal galeon on solaris, or, let me say that as when is the last time you installed gnome properly on solaris (and the sun package is crap -- I'm talking compiling baby -- 3 days of tracking down every dependency in your spare time)
That is *not* minimal dependencies. If there is one thing kde got right, it's having all the depencies right in the source package, rather than scattered across the world.
Yes Konqueror is used as a webbrowser, but the renderer is called khtml. Konqueror is the pane that the different kparts embed into. It is possible, has been done, and isn't a bad idea to use mozilla inside of konqueror to render webpages (now there are some benchmarks I would like to see.)
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
As can be read in the KDE3 beta2 announcement, Konqueror in KDE3 should be a lot better than the KDE2 version. Here is the quote:
"One of the major improvements brought by KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2 is the Javascript/DHTML support in Konqueror," stated David Faure, a Konqueror and KOffice developer. "The DOM 2 model, used to render an HTML page, is now mostly implemented, and changes to the DOM tree are handled much better. The Javascript bindings and support is almost complete, faster and more stable than in KDE 2. These changes result in a much-improved rendering of dynamic websites and is something users will immediately appreciate."
IIRC, the tabbed browsing feature is planned for KDE 3.1.
Does Redhat not package the KDE environment in pieces? If not - why not?
We do. kdelibs+kdebase is enough to run Konqueror.
We aren't splitting things up even more (like, maybe, splitting kcontrol off kdebase) mostly to keep a "ls *.rpm" tree you can bear to look at, and also to save translation cost for package descriptions.
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Konqueror is *not* a web browser.
.ogg or .wav with a simple drag n' drop (including freedb.org querying)), your POP3 account (possibly still in development) in Konqueror, and lots of other things (through KIO).
kHTML is.
Konqueror is a mostly empty shell that wraps around components that use the KPart architecture to display context-dependent widgets/menuitems, or kio_slaves that provide a filesystem-like display of stuffs.
Konqueror technically has the ability of embedding mozilla through the kMozilla component.
But then, you can also view DivX, PS, PDF (through KParts), browse an audio CD (and rip in
Actually, Konqueror is what looks most like the good old Unix philosophy of small tools:
"cat slashdot.org | kHTML | Konqueror"
Besides, with anti-aliased fonts, it's truly gorgeous !
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
The easiest way to upgrade KDE is to wait until your distro with the user friendly install comes out with a new version.
Unless someone knows of a userfriendly installer/upgrader for KDE? Something that ensures dependencies are satisfied and installs everything the correct order? I thought once-upon-a-time someone was working on this, but it doesn't seem to have materialized.
and it is mentioned heavily in the article. Why don't you people read?
Ceci n'est pas un post
I understand Mozilla has had this feature for a long time. It is not a menu/GUI driven option, though.
You can edit the file user.js using the instructions in Custumizing Mozilla
Not exactly user friendly, but fairly easy anyway.
Granted, Galeon is light years ahead of Mozilla in speed (Mozilla is after all based on the Netscape browser that everyone loves to hate) but it's not faster than Konqueror. I don't even want to think about how fast Konq/KHTML will be under 3.0 which is due in a couple of weeks. Another thing that bugs me is he went to all the trouble to download a copy of everything else but didn't even think to get a recent version of Konqueror. I'm not sure if his comparison was very objective.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Another thing I like about the mouse gestures in combination with tabbed windows is being able to open a link in another window in the background. (right click on link, move mouse down, up, release button). For reading /., this is great, as I can open up the stories I want to read in their own windows as I am browsing, then go back and read them.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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