WTF! I need a new web browser!!!!

20 Replies

Today my computer’s browsers played thermonuclear war. I’m frustrating!

Firefox 3

Firefox is the most famous web browser on Linux system. IMHO is almost too weight and too much unstable. Mozilla Foundation seems Ubuntu: great and effective marketing (made by a company) but poor development. It’s a great vaporware.

I got any type of problems with Firefox 3 on my Fedora 9 (my user configuration files was upgraded from Firefox 2):

  • 100% cpu occupation on grails.org (resolved simply deleting ~/.mozilla. but, WTF why I have to lost all my bookmarks to resolve this problem?) — Update: watch at the bottom.
  • sporadic crashes
  • proxy problems (Firefox doesn’t read any information about user/password for authenticated proxies.

Epiphany

Although epiphany uses the same engine (Geko) it results more faster and responsive when do GUI operation and during rendering. Unfortunately epiphany lacks in features,  like session saver, searching inside address bar (I found it only in Firefox 3) and several useful of plugins (for example mugshot). There are also some behaviours that i can’t change, for example I can’t disable the messages which appear when connection switch from https to http (I did also a quick search into configuration editor, but…nothing).

Opera

It’s a closed software, but I tried anyway. First step I tried to set proxy. OMG WTF! No possibility to use the flag “Use this proxy for all protocols”…boring!!! After 2 minutes I removed it.

Konqueror

I’m a GNOME user…Konqueror is poorly integrated into GNOME and I can’t use with GNOME composite manager. Removed!

Midori

Nice idea, a lightweight web browser with WebKit engine. Completely unstable.

Kazerhakase

Another webkit web browser…but is more unstable than Midori.

Any suggestion?

Update 03/11/08@14:27: Thanks to my colleague Alessandro, there is a solution to fix the problem occurred to firefox 3 when I surf on http://www.grails.org (for example). It’s a nvidia bug and not a firefox/Xorg bug. You just have to launch this command:

nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=0 -a GlyphCache=1

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20 thoughts on “WTF! I need a new web browser!!!!”

  2. whitenoise Post author

    uhm, Qt… :P on gnome + composite manager, QT doen’t works…when it will come into fedora repos I will try ;-)

    thanks
    Luca

  3. Kevin Kofler

    Uh, shouldn’t the GNOME Composite Manager work with any apps, no matter what toolkit is being used? If something’s broken there, that’s probably a bug.

  6. martin

    Hm… concerning epiphany – for session saver there’s a workaround: killall -9 epiphany and when starting it again, chose restore session… I wonder why they don’t implement it fully. As for the location bar – when you type, it searches through bookmarks and history, when you write some words (which are obviously not web address) and hit enter, they’ll be searched through google. With the rest you seem to be right, though I am quite content with the features epiphany + epiphany-extensions gives me :)

  7. Corey Burger

    Epiphany has had session saving longer than FF has. For that matter, Epip has had search (on bookmarks) on the address bar and any term that is not a bookmark gets passed to Google (or search engine of your choice).

  10. Debarshi Ray

    Epiphany 2.20.3 on Fedora 8 does offer to restore my previous session if the browser is restarted after an abrupt exit. However it does not save previous entries to text boxes like firefox does. So everytime I have to check my email I have to type in the entire thing, where Firefox would have provided a drop-down. But I am hoping this most likely a configuration issue at my end.

    Notwithstanding the other missing features I have stuck to Epiphany.

    I find you did not mention Galeon. :-)

  12. crf

    Using add-blockplus, you can make pages load faster, not just by blocking ads, but you can block digg and reddit and so on: this stops loading little images next to people’s posts. (It made a big difference for me.)

    Firefox can be set not to load images as well.

    Why not try this?

  13. Iuri Diniz

    Well,
    do like me, stay with firefox 2.

    Firefox 2 fills all my requisites, so it stills good for me (and all my addons works :-) ), but I will upgrade when firefox 3 become more stable.

  14. whitenoise Post author

    @kevin kofler: I will test again ;) When I launched konqueror, it started with two windows: the browser windows which worked fine…and a windows impossible to select and which part of my desktop drawed above. Seems a blocked window…

    @axet: I’m not comparing software…I’m just explain which problem i got from software i tried… ;-)

    @corey: afaik on ephypany there’s a plugin which permit you to save session on a file manually…I don’t know any plugin which save automatically…the only way is to kill epiphany…(as explained by someone)

    @sai: bao! :D

    @bob: uhm ok :)

    @debarshi ray: galeon? :P

    @Rafael: I wanted to start to develop python epiphany plugins…but I hadn’t time to start other projects…so I probably remains with FF…I’m waiting epiphany + webkit…

    @crf: uhm, dunno, I don’t think loading images and is really my problem…

  15. Peter

    For composite manager problem – it is not a window, it is a bug in the compositor, unfortunately still present (I run the svn version because i also apply some patches to make the “effects” more the way I like them – they cannot be configured in the original version of the compositor) – work around is to disable and back enable the compositor in gconf. I am using a pretty old hardware also, which does not allow XVideo to play nicely with composed desktop, so i disable it often, I make a pertty simple script and put it on a button in panel:
    #!/bin/bash -x
    if [ `gconftool-2 -g /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager` == false ];
    then
    gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool true

    else
    gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool false

    fi

  16. pancro

    Why not sticking to the one you like the most and working with the developers to fix the bugs that annoy you?

  17. whitenoise Post author

    uhm, I don’t have C/C++ skills. I can help developers by report new bugs, and this is what I’m doing right now.

    I love epiphany but there are some behaviours that developer will never change IMHO, because are not bugs but design decisions.

    As I said in my previous comment, I thought to start to write epiphany plugins (using python, for example), but ATM I can’t start another project… :-( ….

  20. Pingback: My Firefox Plugins « fucking the white bunny rabbit

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