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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."
It rocks, except for a few JavaScript nasties.
What's the best Open Source browser that doesn't have mozilla dependencies? Konqueror? Or something I'm not aware of? I'd like something that can handle most html3 (nothing too crazy mind you) to embed to handle simple display stuff.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
that now all the major Linux/Cross platform web browsers, and even IE 6 are paying attention to the W3C standards that we will all one day be choosing our browser based on what we like, rather than what web developers like
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
Using X on a small laptop via a fairly powerful firewall machine, I eventually realised that I could run Mozilla on the firewall and put the display on the laptop. Although Mozilla is a rather bigger browser than Opera, it actually runs better in that mode than when I ran Opera on the laptop.
It's curious to see how netscape 4.x isn't even included in that group. Some years ago it was the only browser we could use to decently surf the web.
I've been using mozilla since the M1x releases, and it has certainly improved its capabilities and stability. However I still find the interface too heavy. Perhaps galeon does it better, though.
What I still miss in mozilla (now using 0.9.8) is acceptable support for java and flash. When both plugins are installed they give me so many problems that I end up by uninstalling them.
Engage!
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
So basically this guy had a grudge against Konqueror because he had trouble upgrading KDE. I wouldn't call this a very objective or informative review. The other weakness he cites with Konqueror is lack of features, but most people don't even use the latest "bells and whistles" offered with a new browser build. Usually those "Features" turn out to be annoyances like sidebars.
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!
Come on, the test only briefly mentioned about testing with graphics, CSS, and Javascript. Any modern browser can handle that so easily, it's not even worth testing.
When car magzines do a car review, they floor the gas pedal to get the fastest 0-60mph time. They cut corners much faster than street driving speed to test the suspension and handling characteristics of the car. What I don't understand is, why does this browser review treat these browsers like babies? Throw in some DOM2/3, CSS2/3, bidi text, DHTML, and XHTML! Let the best engineered browser shine, instead of fixating on those performance numbers!
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.
One area where IE simply trashes Netscape and Mozilla is rendering huge tables. I'm talking about the 1 meg of text variety. Has anyone tried putting the various browers through the paces on this kind of test?
If one uses Ximian Gnome, keeping up with all those "horrible" dependencies is a snap. I understand why it can seem like a pain, but what does the reviewer want? STATIC builds of everything? Screw that. I'll just pop open Red Carpet and grab it all at once, thanks...
The Free desktop that Just Works
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/
may not be the best, but with there latest security options, it makes live nice.
Go into
Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Scripts & Windows
and uncheck "open unrequested windows"
The pop-up nightmare has ended!
Not saying other browsers cant do this, but if they can't, they will be real soon.
Now I am just waiting for the "block these sites" style of entry which can be seeded by a downloaded file to block ad servers.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Does Redhat not package the KDE environment in pieces? If not - why not?
With other distributions, it's been possible to install Konqueror and just the base KDE libraries for quite a long time. You should be able to fit all that you need on a handful of floppies - not a tens-of-megs RPM as the author claims.
What about 128-bit support for online transactions? Ease of installing plugins?
There was a linuxjournal article last month comparing many browsers and their ability to handle ssl, printing, etc. I don't think this is the same article (can anyone verify that?).
:)
Anyway, on to my flamebait of a title. Most geeks are developers of some sort, and need to see 'under the hood'. Yeah, you've got source code, but if you're a webmonkey, you need to see the source of the page you're one. That's usually not possible in Mozilla or Netscape if you've POSTed stuff. As much as I'd like to use Mozilla for everything all the time (once it speeds up just a bit more!) I can't - I have to use something else (IE, Konqueror, depending on platform). Why the heck isn't this fixed YET? I see we can get MathML builds, but something as basic as this STILL isn't addressed.
"Go code it yourself" is an answer I feel coming on from someone, but you and I both know it's not a realistic solution.
creation science book
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.
What features are you referring to? All the features you mentioned are in Opera 6 for Linux (and others are even exclusive to the Linux version).
...
... Need I say more? I *have* to use C-c and C-v? Even when cut & pasting from one tab to another? No thanks.
I'm using my web browser 10 h a day (work & play), and for me there's simply *nothing* which even remotely compares to the usability and robustness of Opera (yes, I do have the whole bunch installed).
It's the only program on Linux I ever bought a license for, and looking at the current selection, it likely will hold that position.
Let's go through them:
Konqueror: No tabbed browsing. Nuff said. I usually have about ten browser windows open
Mozilla, Netscape & Galeon: I'm an editor in a webboard and that f*cking textarea input bug makes it hardly bearable to use it for that.
It just shouldn't be that a browser in this day and age inserts text where *it* wants and not where *I* want.
Cut and paste
And no browser I know compares to Opera when it comes to bookmark management, especially with the new search function in 6.0.
My 2c
b.
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
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
Opera has a few features that I think that sets it apart from the other browsers(I may be wrong though...). Mouse Gestures... I sometimes get tired of having to go hit the back button, the forward button and so on and so on... I can hold the Right Mouse Button and then hit the Left Button and I go back, I do the opposite to go forward. I can go over a link, right click and pull downward and it opens the link in a new window. The Bookmark Shortcuts... You can give a bookmark a shortcut name so now, instead of going into bookmarks, you could just put your shortcut name for the url. These are 2 features I'm amazed that no one else has done yet and something that I think sets Opera apart from the rest.
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.
The galeon example here wasn't a great one, either, because I (apparently) already had all of the prerequisites installed. What's really cool is bringing up a really basic box that has practically nothing installed on it, and typing "apt-get install kde" (or whatever other large, complex system) and watching it get and install all of X, KDE, etc.
It's even nice when you want to configure/build yourself. Just "apt-get source galeon" instead and it'll download and unpack the source tree. You then have the option of configure-make-make install or you can look in the debian directory, tweak all of the config params and use "dpkg-buildpackage" to build your own customized installable package that meshes seamlessly with the system. And if there's no debian package available for an app, it's pretty trivial to add your own debian directory to the source tree and build and install a package so that, again, it fits into the system.
Oh, and don't let all of the "but Debian stable is *ancient*" naysayers discourage you. Just run "testing" or "unstable" and you'll have all of the latest. And don't let the description fool you, "unstable" is very solid. I run "stable" on servers (actually, I'm running "testing" on my servers right now; they're not mission-critical and 3.0 is really close) and "unstable" on my desktops, although when 3.0 is released, I may switch to "testing" on the desktops (i.e. stick with Sid).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Despite what people say about Konqueror, you haven't really made it in the open source browser world until you have a fork like Pornzilla that's truly devoted to surfing the forgotten 20% of the traffic on the internet.
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.
I've been using Opera since the 3.x days, back when it was only offered on Windows. Now it is my main browser for linux, and it works for 95% of the sites that I visit. Opera is one of the very few programs I'm willing to pay money for, in fact I am grateful that they actually made the effort to port their browser to so many different platforms.
Three are a few things I just can't live without in a browser now:
1. Mouse gesters. Once you learn them you will *NEVER* go back. In fact, whenever I'm using one of those other browsers I end up trying the mouse gesters (which of course does nothing).
2. Tabbed windows (I know most of the browsers offer this now, but Opera has always had it).
3. All those cool search boxes/quick links you can customize and put into your personal bar.
4. The main search box (deafaul google of course but it can be anything you want).
I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch. My only gripe is that Opera sometimes crashes, although the newest version 6.0 B1 hasn't crashed on me once yet (although it has only been released a few days ago).