Alternatives to The Alternative

For some time now (some years to be more precise) all the open source world have been spinning around firefox when it comes to web browsers. There are even forks (ice weasel or something like that) or whatever they call it because a) it's apparently good and b) it's apparently not enough free (as in FLOSS). But as many of you who follows my blog know, it does not suit me for various reasons. One of the problems I see is too complex GUI, not very well integration into gnome (this one improved a lot during past releases), sluggishness, XUL, direction towards implementing useless stuff (like personas) instead of bringing actually useful extensions (like adblock) into the browser itself, localization handling (why the hell are languages treated as extensions?!!!). Firefox was originally supposed to be something like lightweight and speedy version of mozilla, but it's no longer truth.

When I first switched away from firefox I used epiphany, then webkit came along and I started testing it on midori, which in rather short time became my main web-browser. And then Google Chrome / Chromium came along and caused a little revolution (compare the simplistic Chromium with one toolbar, mostly occupied by some magic input field, with no menubar whatsoever with default firefox setup). Not only in UI, but also in stability — something on a page freezes? A (flash) plugin crashes? No worry, it will bring down only the tab in question, the browser itself remains working. And not to mention it started the competition in javascript speed.

The main purpose of this post is to shortly describe the three open source alternatives to Firefox I mentioned above and give a quick overview in what are they good and in what they aren't.

Epiphany

The main principle behind epiphany is (for good or bad) KISS (keep it simple, stupid) which already suggests in what it might be good and in what it might not. It's a very lightweight browser with a rather simple UI, it has a reasonable set of extensions (like AdBlock or Certificates management), search (via google) implemented in location bar, it's fast and very well integrated in gnome. On the flip side, it does not save session unless it crashes. Which is a major pita, but last time I checked, the authors were against implementing it. And thanks to it using webkitgtk engine, it supports html5 youtube (you'll need Fedora 13 version of webkitgtk, the one in Fedora 12 is too old). Alas, with the switch to webkit from gecko support for ftp were dropped, java is not (yet) supported, and some of the features (like password saving, or managing certificates) stopped working, but it's steadily getting better and I believe in Gnome 2.30, there will be no regressions compared to the older gecko version and tons of new features.

Midori

Another lightweight webkitgtk based webbrowser. As it uses same engine like epiphany, many things that I said about epiphany can be said about midori too — it's fast, it supports html5 youtube, java does not work, ftp protocol is not supported, web auth is integrated with gnome-keyring (thanks to libsoup backend) and it has the awesome webinspector. In addition, it comes with session saving, adblock, trash can for closed tabs, spellchecking in multiple languages, identity masking, and quite powerful means for UI optimizing (like it can hide menu bar, can display tabs on side as a list, can disable close button on tabs [they can be closed with middle-click], can hide status bar — location bar is then used for showing the hyperlinks destination, ...). And to add to that, it has customizable search implemented into its location bar – not only you can can search what you want on whatever search engine you've added, but you can also use keywords (e.g. when I write "j 友達" it will show me the word in jisho, "gi fedora" will redirect me to google images search for fedora etc.).

I could probably go on with this praise — after all midori is the web browser that suits my needs best and has the most usable / effective UI (IMHO) that I've come across.

Chromium

Well, I guess this one does not need much introduction. It's the opensource version of Google Chrome, it's based on webkit/chromium port, has a really simplistic, effective and usable UI — unless you open too many tabs. Then it becomes hell none of the zillions extension helped me out of. Plus, as the UI is heavily customized, it does not fit very well into gnome desktop, but I'd say it's really well designed. As I already mentioned, there are zillions of extensions (probably less than for firefox but still too much for me to be able to know even a tiny fraction of them) which can improve the already very good browser, and among which is not missing adblock and flashblock ;-) I quite fancy the xkcd view one. And like with other webkit based browsers — awesome webinspector, awesome speed, but also no ftp and java. Session saving and tabs undeleting is a sure thing, the already mentioned "magic location bar" works similarly like in midori.

It's possible to get html5 youtube working, but not with Fedora packages (for understandable reasons; I suspect though, that after it matures enough to get into fedora proper repos, there'll appear also something like chromium-nonfree in rpmfusion to fix that).



(note about the chromium title bar — if I cannot have chromium looking nice with plain gtk, I'll at least look at something that I fancy ;-))

Mark the difference (ugly fonts in Fedora?)

So, in my previous post there started appearing discussion about fonts antialiasing. So I though it would be better to spin off this discussion in a post of it's on, installed freetype-freeworld (which improved drastically fonts in chromium, but did nothing with gtk), fired up gimp and created this (click on the image to see it in its original size if it looks blurry):

The first line is no antialiasing, no hinting, the second one is antialiasing only, the third one is antialiasing+hinting and last one is antialiasing+hinting with forced autohinter. Looks like no hinting or autohinter is what can be achieved without installing the package from rpmfusion, while the third line needs the package with patented stuff in. Apparently, no antialiasing isn't a solution – we're not living in stone age, antialiasing without hinting is blurry and autohinter works good only for small sizes, on the other hand, the hinting without autohinter breaks on simple japanese… Make your own image about what's best.

And as a bonus: hinting without autohinter in chromium


autohinter in midori


Dunno how you, but I see the autohinter as best working for me.

Firefox 3.7 New Design

Well, quite an unexpected post in my blog... In Chromium's Tips and Tricks section I noticed an article entitled First Look: Firefox 3.7’s New Design. After briefly looking at the Vista Aero look I went WTF! I just cannot seem to find this semitransparency in windows nice... But well, I scrolled down and down and down until noticing the Win XP version which I deem to be the best. Well, if such UI gets implemented on linux as well, it would definitely prompt me to try using firefox again, as it's basically Chromium UI with tiny changes in ordering and separate search entry (I prefer search to be integrated in location bar though).

The UI is very effective, as I have discovered when using Chromium over these past few days, and I think it's been a high time for the redesign. For once I have to praise the guys at mozilla for doing the right thing ;-) It's would be shame, though, to not note that midori introduced this kind of UI as well with it's recent 0.1.8 release (although as an option, rather than as the only setting). It's a prove that Google's decision to introduce their own web browser will lead to benefit of users of other browsers as well.

AdBlock in Midori!

I must have been lucky today... First I installed chromium and now, after trying out latest git snapshot of midori, I've discovered, it can actually block ads (via the included, by default disabled 'Advertisement blocker' extension)! Well, it's pretty lame still as I noticed it only blocks google ads (probably because of missing filters) and adding filters seems to not work (not that I have any filters anyway) and there are loads of 'FIXME' comments in the source code, but I cannot wait till it gets finished :-)

Now, if only I knew how the 'Mouse Gestures' extension is supposed to work (if it works at all), it would totally make the day even more awesome!

And thus the browser war hath started

Behold heathens, new web-browser hath descended upon the land of Fedora. Witness the few steps needed to deploy at FergyTech. The ultimate battle for superiority may begin. Who shall be the winner?

Well, that somehow summarizes my exitement. I wonder which browser I'll end-up with in Fedora 12 :-D For now, I am using simultaneously Midori (webkitgtk)

Epiphany (xulrunner)

and Chromium (webkit/chromium)

now ;-)

Btw. I just recently used firefox once again because of some download which worked only via firefox (I don't really know why though) and the page had an enormous amount of adds... well... to be fair... I got used again to displayed adds with midori (it's not possible yet to block adds in webkitgtk), but the experience with firefox was about five times worse... The amount of windows that popped up was just terrible... Well, I'd say that using firefox without AdBlock is in a sense equivalent to taking a stroll into underworld >_<

Maybe, I'll write a short review about those three above mentioned browses (plus epiphany 2.27 snapshot which uses webkitgtk instead of xulrunner) when I gain more experience with Chromium (so for now I'll keep the awesomeness of midori's location bar only hinted in the screenshot above ;-).