Ubuntu Wiki

Choice

• Let us decide on one browser. I am for Firefox at the moment, but might favour to switch Midori in a later release. Does anyone know how to add our own plugins, change the default start page and add other search engines to Firefox?

Firefox

• +1 I think Firefox is the best browser at the moment for this project. (Shae Smittle)
• Ed Hewitt +1
  • Surveys I held for U-lite showed people preferred Firefox to Opera, Midori, and Kazehakase. (Shae Smittle)

• +1 Luther Firefox with extensions beats the rest hands down IMHO.

• This Explains how to se global preferences. Only tells you how to set the global home page, though. (Thomas Chace)

• +1 John Thng Compatibility with web sites and fast security patches from official sources

• Yves Dupont -1: Firefox is not slim or lightweight. Memory Consumption is too high.

• FreeAtMind +1, in future maybe chromium ;), for now firefox is the best option not light but have all features and stability needed

• Andrew Oakley +1, none of the lightweight browsers work well with Flash. Option to install Flash must be available, indeed option to install "genuine" Adobe Flash must be available from Ubuntu Partner repo. That basically means Firefox. I've browsed videos on Youtube with LXDE + Firefox 3 + Adobe Flash on a virtual system with 128MB and 1x 1.6GHz CPU and seen only 96MB RAM consumed. So long as you don't browse multiple flash-heavy pages then Firefox 3 can be remarkably resource-anorexic.

• Add an option to customize Firefox for small screens? Might be desirable for netbooks. Mikhail Maksimov

Kazehakase

Homepage

• Luther: I added this as it is lighter than firefox. It is for people who want a lighter browser.

Midori

Homepage

• Luther: I added this as it is lighter than firefox. It is for people who want a lighter browser. This is quite new.

• IMHO, Midori can be good in the future. However it's not yet ready for real production use since it's too unstable.
• I have tried the ver 0.1.2, it can't even login to facebook, I didn't try the newer version I'm not used to compiling

• Yves Dupont: In fact its a really lightweight and fast browser, perhaps we should stick with WebKit Engine. But Midori is not stable yet. We should find an alternative

Arora

Homepage

• Arora still has few bugs, but it is stable, fast and user-friendly.
• I have tried the ver 0.6, yes its fast and user-friendly and less bug than midori 0.1.2
• Ed Hewitt -1, its very quick and light, but very buggy and unstable, it crashes loads/

Opera

• If proprietary software is acceptable, this one is absolutely most suitable. (PCMan)
• in my experience opera 9.64 sometimes crashes, i'm not sure about other versions (Payne Samad Loh)
• I think proprietary is no choice here. Alternatives are widely adapted and I favour the concept of Open Source. It is also in line with the Ubuntu community. (Mario Behling)
• Opera is neither freely distributable nor does it works with as many sites as Firefox, firefox is the better choice. (Thomas Chace)

Epiphany (default browser in Gnome)

• Christian Johansson: I added this since I think it can be a good alternative to Firefox. I have gone over to using Epiphany instead of Firefox. Epiphany works fine with the same flash and Java plug-ins as Firefox uses. I have yet to encounter a page that works with Firefox but not with Epiphany. Epiphany seems to use slightly less memory than Firefox but it has the limitation that it has much less features than Firefox.

• David Sugar +1, it fits the mission better than Firefox, especially for very low end specs.

Chromium

• Julien Lavergne +1
• Chow Loong Jin +1, fast startup times, significantly less memory leaks than Firefox, and the ability to kill Flash without restarting the browser

Benchmarks

Startup

Memory using Xfce task manager

Memory 1 : Memory with google.com, wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu and gmail.com connected. Memory 2 : Same that 1 + 5 ubuntu.com pages Memory 3 : Closing all the pages except google.com

Memory using about:memory of Chromium

Summarize

• Firefox
  • + Firefox is well-known
  • + Well maintained upstream and on Ubuntu
  • + Many features
  • + Good support for web sites (like banks sites)
  • + Supported in many languages
  • - Slow on startup
  • - Memory usage
  • ? Rendering seems slower
• Midori
  • + Small and fast
  • + Memory usage
  • - Upstream active but with limited developers compared to the 2 others.
  • - Features limited
  • - Less support for web sites (like banks sites)
  • - Problems with rendering some web pages

  • - No SSL/Certificates manager, no warning for untrusted site

• Chromium
  • + Similar to Chrome, which begin to be well-known
  • + Good interface for small screen
  • + Upstream active, supported by Google
  • + html5 h264 support (youtube +veoh)
  • +- Firefox have still more possibility and features than Chromium
  • +- Average support for web sites (like banks sites)
  • ? Maybe be maintained by Mobile Team

  • - Private data send (see Iron implementation

  • No SSL/Certificates manager

Notes : support for web site can be faked if the browser is saw as a famous browser.