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."

Comments

What about Konqueror

[Starving Artist]

It rocks, except for a few JavaScript nasties.

Re:What about Konqueror

[nick255]

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.

Re:What about Konqueror

[Zathrus]

In a case where X displays on the majority of browsers, but does not display on browser Y the fault lies with Y, not X.

This is how the world works. This is how TCP/IP has worked for 20 years (BSD was the standard - if you interfaced properly with BSD, you met the real world standard, since BSD varied from the "official" TCP standard in certain cases).

For as much whinging as there is about IE, the fact is that it is now the defacto standard for webpage rendering. It's wise to fulfill the official W3C standard. It's smart to then go make sure things work like IE as much as possible (without the random security holes). Where the two contradict each other is the fun part... do you write to the official standard and hope MS fixes things, or do you write to the de facto standard because users don't give a crap about W3C - they just want to see the content.

And, really, that's what it's about - the content. Being standards compliant means jack if you can't view 20% of the websites out there. I used to run Netscape 1.x-4.x, and then Opera 5.x on Windows. I finally gave up in frustration after too many sites either wouldn't display or hosed Opera. And after much bitching and moaning I started using IE. I'm not happy that I have to use it, but know what? I have to admit that surfing is now easier and more reliable than it was under either NS or Opera. And no, IE doesn't crash constantly anymore. It certainly does so less than either of the aforementioned browsers. Maybe the Linux versions are better about all of this - I don't have a spare box available currently to test with.

I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.

Let's hope..

[IamTheRealMike]

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

Re:Let's hope..

[BurritoWarrior]

Except this is exactly the point of Microsoft's .net initiative. To make the internet (or what most people think is the internet - www) not be HTTP based anymore, but to rely on proprietary extensions/applets/applications built around the .net framework.

In their eyes 90% of the web will require IE in order for the "web services" to work. And they will leverage things like MS Office to get the ball rolling. No longer will new features be added directly to office, but will be available on the web - provided the user has Windows and is using IE...

Mod this as flamebait if you want, but that certainly seems to me to be the direction they are heading. Heck, MS execs are even talking about how http's days are coming to an end...

Opera ads became intrusive

[GSV NegotiableEthics]

Opera used to be my favorite browser, but I switched from that to Mozilla at around Christmas, simply because of one ad campaign that involved an animated gif of human head that waggled from left to right. It was so intrusive that I took to covering the ad area with a gnome-terminal, and looked around for another browser. I told the Opera people about my problems.

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.

I'll go with Opera

[Uttles]

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.

KDE

[asv108]

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.

Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[tomRakewell]

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!

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[swillden]

And, for the paranoid, it handles cookie requests as well as... Lynx!

Actually, I think Konqueror is the best browser available for cookie handling. One major feature it has that all of the others (I've seen) lack is the ability to look at the cookie before deciding to accept/reject it. In particular I like to look at the expiration date, because cookies that don't last long don't bother me much.

Looking at those expiration dates inspired me to hack my copy of Konqueror so that I can configure it to automatically accept any cookies of short duration (i.e. expiration not specified or specified to be within one day) on a per-site basis.

The other thing I want to change but haven't gotten round to, is to give myself the option of rejecting cookies based on the origin server instead of the stated cookie domain.

You might this this is a lot of bother, but I find that with a few such options in place I can both minimize the number of cookies that are tracking me and avoid having to deal with a lot of "Accept this cookie?" dialog boxes popping up all the time. The "accept short cookies" option was a huge win in achieving a nice balance.

Oh, and yes I'm going to submit my patches, but they're pretty rough right now -- not something that any maintainer would accept.

Push them to the limit!

[ihatelisp]

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!

Re:Push them to the limit!

[pointwood]

That is not something you just do - that takes a lot of work I believe. However, here is a pretty good overview of the browsers support for the W3C recommendations: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/index.html?/~ppk/js/b rowsers.html.

Re:Using mozilla

[Spankophile]

It's curious to see how netscape 4.x isn't even included [...]

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

png/alpha full support

[Dante'sPrayer]

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.

Internationalization, anyone?

[ThinkingGuy]

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.

Table rendering performance

[Admiral Llama]

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?

Mozilla all the way ..

[TheViffer]

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.

Re:My question is this -

[starseeker]

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.

VIEW SOURCE is a necessity - mozilla loses

[mgkimsal2]

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. :)

Konquerer should get a lot better soon

[pointwood]

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.

Give credit where it's due !

[kigrwik]

Konqueror is *not* a web browser.

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 .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).

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 !

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Simon Brooke]

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.

Yes, but, seriously, how many of those pages were valid, standards conformant code? For a long time Konqueror was the only browser which displayed all the features of my home page (which is valid code) correctly. Now Mozilla has caught up, and I believe (though I haven't checked myself) later IE6's can display it too. But while Konqi has some deficiencies in its ECMAScript, it's HTML/CSS rendering are highly standards-conformant

It's not the Konqi team's fault if 90% of the commercial 'Web designers' out there are blithering incompetents who could not write valid code to save their lives.

Re:Galeon is hard to install/upgrade?

[swillden]

You really ought to consider giving Debian a try. I like to build stuff myself on a regular basis, too, but there's also an awful lot of stuff I just want to get installed with minimum hassle.

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).