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 ;-))

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.

Random Leonidas Goodies

The Leonidas (Fedora 11) release is drawing near and I am currently using it as my primary system (with the Fedora 10 release as backup). And so I thought I'd highlight what improvements I find especially useful/interesting to me.

Intel Kernel Mode Setting working

And that means flawless transition from plymouth to gdm. Plymouth still hasn't been updated to the Leonidas theme, but I am eagerly waiting since I've seen some screencasts of what might it look like. But back to the KMS. I have intel graphics and on F10 this has been disabled which meant that in order to have nice graphical boot I needed to pass vga=0x318 to kernel line in grub. It had the drawback that while the screen resolution is 1280x800, the resolution used for plymouth was 1024x768 which meant no nice transition to gdm. This is no longer true in Rawhide and as soon as plymouth starts I'm having 1280x800 res. until the time I shut the laptop down. And what's more, gdm nicely fades in over the plymouth which is really cool.

IntelKMS feature page says it's 87% complete, but for me it's now working flawlessly (and recently even metacity started being fast again with compositing manager enabled). Kudos to everyone who worked on these two things for Fedora 10 and 11!

Booting faster and faster

Yes, after selecting my usual set of services (combination of server and laptop services) and enabling ext4 I can clearly see some improvements in the boot time speed over F10. It's not the same time as the 20SecondStartup feature advertises, but it seems to be a little over 30s which is pretty good with my slow disk and the kind of services I start.

And again, kudos for the people working on this. Since around Fedora 8 the boot time gradually improves for me. Keep up the good work. But even then there are still things that need attention, like slow logging into the desktop (partly due to having a lot of things in panel) and still slow (a few seconds) X start. So I am eagerly awaiting what Fedora 12 brings ;-)

Internal USB camera finally working

Yes, that was the last piece of hardware I have that wasn't working in Fedora. It's some weird one and in Fedora 8 or so I was even trying to get it work myself (without success) but now it works out of box. Kudos again for the work being put even into these parts of linux :-) I'd still like to know, how to turn it off, the always shining green light isn't exactly comfortable at night...

Touchpad tapping

While I am in the hardware section I though I'd mention this. I use touchpad mainly at train and consider tapping and scrolling to be one of the most important featrues. Unfortunatelly in F11 it is disabled by default and I was over too lazy to try to enable it (since at least in all previous releases it required either installing non-official package or edditing some config scripts). But today I've decided to google for solution and found a not-so-much-advertised really easy solution. There's a new touchpad tab in mouse preferences which makes touchpad configuration fast and easy.

"Updates updated"

It seems there are two interesting improvements coming for the update system. One makes the graphical updates via PackageKit much better experience, as shown in hugsie's post. Looks like I'll finally switch from yum update to PackageKit updates, it now shows all the info I like (like what package is currently being downloaded/updated/cleared...) plus it shows update info (like changelog or stuff from bodhi).

Another one is Presto. This is great especially for people with low bandwidths because what it does is basically using diffs instead of whole rpms. Note that each repository need to have this feature enabled, because if you don't have a place to download diffs from, you'll endup downloading whole packages. The coolness is that, thanks to downloading only diffs, usually a lot less of download is needed (usually about 70% less).

Updated webkitgtk

Well, one of the things I cannot leave out is webkitgtk. The webkitgtk guys started doing regular releases (as oposed to nightly builds) and Rawhide is pretty much kept in sync with them. This basically means much stabler webkit than in F10 (and currently even stabler than firefox in rawhide). Next, the all the coolness of webkitgtk download comes bundled within as well and we can expect more cool features, like integrated spell checker, in near future as well. I'd say webkitgtk is progressing nicely.

Some days ago I've also read a short post about open media coolnes in Firefox 3.1(3.5). Well, while the mozilla guys make it sound like they're leading the wagon here, they're rather more or less on par with webkitgtk. Just open this page in midori and in firefox and see for yourself. Except for the fact that they have an ugly check for exact gecko version and thus hide one of the goodies from webkit users (even though it would most likely work) the rest works there:


That said, webkitgtk has still a long way to go before it can be the only web rendering engine for me. Maybe I'll put together a list of features I'm still missing there, but that's for another post ;-)

And much more

Yep, I've highlighted a few features/improvements in Leonidas that I noticed and deemed interesting enough to write about them, however the Feature list for F11 is much longer. To name a few others I find interesting: Automatic Fonts and Mime Installer, DeviceKit, Ext4 Default Filesystem, iBus or Brand New Volume Control.

Gecko is getting worse?!

First let me start with a simple statement: I wrote this post from Midori web-browser. If you'd like to guess why, read on.

I didn't want to write this particular post so soon, but I just couldn't hold it any more. In four hours of doing random stuff on computer, gecko managed to anger me to the point I just couldn't go to sleep before writing a rant about it.

First it started with Firefox only, now it's happening to Epiphany, too. Gecko is eating my CPU. I cannot explain why, I cannot tell when, because it's totally random. Just out of the blue, my laptop starts to be dreadfully slow, and until I kill epiphany, it stay such (well, I have never had the patience to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes, so in longer time it might fix itself).

Why ranting about it today? Because it happened twice and both when I was doing my favourite stuff. First I was sketching some echo icons (I'll perhaps write a post about those tomorrow) and suddenly inkscape started to be so slow that it was literally unusable. I wondered what happened to it, and after about 2 minutes I finally fired up system monitor to see if there is anything to see - and there was! Epiphany, which was on the background, on a different virtual desktop, was sucking up CPU. I killed it (I kill epiphany instead of closing it to keep my session saved) and inkscape immediately stared to behave normally.

Next, I was watching some series and in one of interesting scenes the video started playing so slowly that it was pretty quickly out of sync with audio. I went WHOA? My CPU should handle that well. So I paused the playing, got out of the fullscreen view and looked what was happening. Again, CPU was 100% used! While doing nothing! This time I fired up new tab in terminal and killed epiphany. CPU use immediately droped to 0% and I could watch the rest of the episode.

Why I rant about gecko and not epiphany? The reasons are simple - when xulrunner in Fedora was still 1.9b5, this thing happened to firefox. Quite cassualy. But epiphany was fine. BUT. After update to 1.9 final (and waiting for epiphany rebuild, because the mozilla guys again change something so that most xulrunner apps started crashing) epiphany started to suffer from this issue as well. I can only ask: what are you guys at mozilla doing? Preparing for next release? Putting random infinite loops to gecko code, so that you can remove some of them in next release and say it's faster and more efficient? Gah.

Anyway, don't take the last few senteces seriously, it's over too much exagerated what might be the worst case scenairo behaind the curtains ;-)

And why do I not file a bug against it?

• I am lazy


• Someone probably have done it already


• I'd rather spent my time debuging webkit than gecko


• I have better things to do than trying to figure out some random, hard to reproduce bug in gecko


• If I go crazy, I can use epiphany with webkit backend - even though it lacks some features I use, it works

And yeah, you might ask, isn't it a result of me having 50+ opened tabs assorted into 4 windows? My answer would be - old gecko handled it well, webkit handles it even better than that, why gecko 1.9 cannot?

And one random rant for the end: is it just me, or does firefox/gecko does not remember me being logged in here on the blog? It behaves like I am not logged, when I click log in, it quickly discovers I am already logged, but when I go back to my blog homepage it still thinks I am not logged in. WebKit does not suffer this issue, which makes my blog managing easier to do in webkit based browsers...

Update 1: On suggestion from Kevin Kofler, I hereby thank all the people involved in KHTML, WebKit, WebKit gtk port and epiphany for they hard work towards perfect *nix web-browser engine and lightwieght native-gtk web-browser :-) Well, I could also include konqueror folks, but for some reason I don't like it's UI...