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Orwell
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01 Aug 2009, 11:45 am

I've heard some hype about how Webkit is supposedly a superior rendering engine than Gecko (the one behind all the Mozilla-derived browsers) and so I was looking for a suitable Webkit-based browser to play around with. At this moment I'm using Midori 0.1.7 (most likely I'll download and compile the more recent 0.1.8, but I'm using what was in the repos for now) and while it is quite quick (and more standards-compliant than Firefox), it has some stability issues and is nowhere near being a feature-complete browser. And I tend to notice this among all the Webkit browsers I've tried: they're just missing a lot of important features. Arora has major Javascript problems, Konqueror is just an unworkable mess, and Chrome has yet to release a functioning Linux port.

So... am I missing something? Is there a killer Webkit browser out there I've overlooked? Like I said, Midori's fast, but there are significant enough problems in it that I would likely prefer Gecko or Opera for regular use.


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supahneko
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01 Aug 2009, 1:54 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_we ... d_browsers
Epiphany is the only one on the list that I've tried, but that was a year ago and I didn't use it that much. I might reinstall it...



Fuzzy
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01 Aug 2009, 3:00 pm

I needed to compile some webkit stuff to do a project but was unable to resolve dependencies.


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Orwell
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01 Aug 2009, 7:15 pm

supahneko wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-based_browsers
Epiphany is the only one on the list that I've tried, but that was a year ago and I didn't use it that much. I might reinstall it...

Epiphany is Gecko last I checked... and it's not very good, either. There are plans to move Epiphany to Webkit, and that may be semi-viable. I'll be watching development on that front. Of the others listed there, most are either unavailable for my platform or just plain sucky. I'm looking at you, Arora.

Midori is extremely light, though. I hadn't realized just how much Iceweasel was slowing down my whole system. Replacing it with Midori and it suddenly feels like I doubled the RAM.


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Orwell
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01 Aug 2009, 7:19 pm

Fuzzy wrote:
I needed to compile some webkit stuff to do a project but was unable to resolve dependencies.

# aptitude build-dep midori

Should do it. That'll give you the webkit rendering engine and very few other dependencies (midori is small, doesn't need much else).


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DieMenschMaschine
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02 Aug 2009, 4:31 am

konqueror



Orwell
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02 Aug 2009, 10:32 am

DieMenschMaschine wrote:
konqueror

Eww. No, Konqueror just outright sucks. It's ridiculously slow, and it fails at rendering a lot of pages pretty badly. You can't even log on to Facebook using Konqueror. Even a KDE fanboy friend of mine claims that it's worse than IE. Plus, it has too many Qt dependencies. I use GTK+ environments.

And technically, Konqueror is KHTML, not Webkit.


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TOGGI3
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02 Aug 2009, 3:44 pm

epiphany can be built with webkit.

Theres arora, midori, chromium, and epiphany-webkit.

you might just have to wait until these projects mature enough to your liking.



Orwell
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02 Aug 2009, 4:12 pm

TOGGI3 wrote:
you might just have to wait until these projects mature enough to your liking.

That's what I'm guessing.

I'm liking Webkit's speed, but one thing that's bugging me- all of the Webkit browser projects seem intent on providing a simple, lightweight browser. I'm not optimistic that any of these will develop to the point of being a real rival to Firefox in terms of providing anything resembling a complete feature set, so even if Webkit is better than Gecko (and it seems to be, from the relative performance of the two on my system) the various Webkit browsers won't really be viable alternatives. I've tried basically every browser I've ever heard of, and more and more it just seems that Firefox is the only worthwhile, feature-complete browser available. All the others are missing what I consider to be essential functionality. (Adblock, script whitelist, and cookie management are the big ones that are usually missing)


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yesplease
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02 Aug 2009, 6:14 pm

Orwell wrote:
Midori is extremely light, though. I hadn't realized just how much Iceweasel was slowing down my whole system. Replacing it with Midori and it suddenly feels like I doubled the RAM.
You may want to check out swiftweasel w/ the usual noscript/flashblock add-ons, if you value memory use. I have 128mb and swiftweasel seems to be less memory intensive than even Midori/Arora.



Orwell
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02 Aug 2009, 7:14 pm

yesplease wrote:
You may want to check out swiftweasel w/ the usual noscript/flashblock add-ons, if you value memory use. I have 128mb and swiftweasel seems to be less memory intensive than even Midori/Arora.

They don't have a PPC version. Besides, I was specifically interested in looking at the Webkit rendering engine, not just in getting a low-resource browser. Webkit's fast, and an excellent engine, but unfortunately noone has yet built a decent browser around it.


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Orwell
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03 Aug 2009, 3:41 pm

Aha! I've finally found a good, stable, fast Webkit browser which (through plugins) has most of the features I want. It's the original Webkit browser: Safari.

Problem is, they haven't released a Linux version yet... and I don't think they intend to. :lol: :wink:


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ToadOfSteel
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03 Aug 2009, 3:47 pm

Webkit is only getting a lot of hype right now via the hype that Google Chrome got... now that people realize that Firefox is still the superior browser in 95% of all cases (the other 5% being very low end machines and netbooks, although this number will increase as the number of netbooks in use does), the hype is dying down...

And Safari is a crappy browser unless you're using it on an apple machine... it works well integrated into OSX, but otherwise fails miserably when measured up to Firefox (On a windows machine it still beats IE, but that's not saying much)...



Orwell
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03 Aug 2009, 4:06 pm

ToadOfSteel wrote:
Webkit is only getting a lot of hype right now via the hype that Google Chrome got... now that people realize that Firefox is still the superior browser in 95% of all cases (the other 5% being very low end machines and netbooks, although this number will increase as the number of netbooks in use does), the hype is dying down...

It's faster and more standards-compliant than Gecko. But yes, Firefox is just so well developed that I don't think anything else will really catch up to it. Even if it's using a third-best rendering engines (Webkit and Presto both beat out Gecko) Gecko is still very good and only Firefox has all the advanced features available. For most purposes, the extra tenth of a second of page load is worth it for all the goodies that are available in FF.


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DieMenschMaschine
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03 Aug 2009, 10:22 pm

yes i know konqueror is khtml. isn't webkit a fork of khtml... i don't know why you can't load facebook up in konqueror, but everyone else can. was just a suggestion, no need to get all snotty, gnome fan boy.



Orwell
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03 Aug 2009, 10:45 pm

DieMenschMaschine wrote:
yes i know konqueror is khtml. isn't webkit a fork of khtml... i don't know why you can't load facebook up in konqueror, but everyone else can. was just a suggestion, no need to get all snotty, gnome fan boy.

Webkit was initially a fork of KHTML, but with enough improvements that it works a lot better.

Konqueror fails at rendering a lot of different web pages, not just Facebook. And even when it does render pages, it's slow and it's missing too many features.

And for the record, I don't always use GNOME. I've tried KDE on numerous occasions and I use OpenBox a lot. KDE4 just has too many issues for now, though it is getting better with each release.


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