Choice of a web browser

eax.qbyte said:
Does it mean Qupzilla is preffered to be used in kde? how about xfce? which browser seems to best in that environment ?
Click to expand...

Both qupzilla and Falkon does not require KDE specific components to run with full functionality, thought you defenitly need some qt5 libs. I use Falkon with my own custom WM without desktop environment and it could be one of the best Qt based browser.
 
Qupzilla is deprecated and is now called Falkon. Falkon uses Qt5 so that is probably your best option on KDE. On XFCE Firefox is probably the best.
 
www/netsurf
For a simple X context with a Window manager like fluxbox.
For those who don't want to setup a full desktop as Gnome, KDE, and want the fewest dependencies
Run with its own renderer engine, no javascript, compile very fast. Incredibly lightweight.
You won't be able to play youtube, but you will be able to read most of site. Enough for administrator

www/firefox
Current version is 60. Since 57, Firefox has a brand new and fast engine Quantum. This is now, according to me, the best choice for FreeBSD... and also for Windows and Linux. This is the only Web browser I use across all my devices.
I use a little Opera (Blink) under Windows and Linux because there is a free embedded VPN, for the rest of time I use Firefox.
As now, Firefox has the same speed as Chromium, perhaps faster. Very stable.

www/opera
This is opera 16 with presto engine
This was the FreeBSD users favourite and beloved web browser... light but powerful, fast, stable, few dependencies
Before Firefox... I was using Opera on Windows. Good souvenirs.... a web browser that brought many things... speed dial, embedded Javascript control...
But Opera has dropped Presto and lost his mind switching to Blink (Chromium) engine.
This browser is not developed anymore. I always hope that someone could relaunch Presto Engine in an opensource project to give us more Web Renderer engines alternative.

www/chromium
I don't recommend it, and I frankly hate it. But Chrome (not Chromium) on Windows or Linux, no problem.
Many users encounter recurrent stability issues (it seems to depend on graphic hardware)

Compiling time IS A NIGHTMARE. This is simply incredible. Takes more time to compile than LibreOffice.

The reason is very simple.... at this moment each time Chromium recompile the Renderer Engine (Blink)
Blink is not offered as a separated package. There is now Webengine, but this is under QT5. Chromium is under GTK3

www/iridium
Iridium is basically chromium with minor modification and exactly the same stability issues.

www/waterfox
This browser gained popularity at a time it was the only Firefox 64 bit incarnation for Windows
Since Firefox launched his regular 64 build release, I personally don't see much interest for it
Still experimental under FreeBSD. I don't recommend it because still runs with old Gecko engine.
Gecko with time became incredibly slow, this is the reason why many users switched to Chrome
On the contrary could be interesting for those who want to keep the XUL extensions (based as today on Gecko 56 Engine)

www/palemoon
An old school Gecko engine, for aficionados. At the time of Firefox Gecko, could be interesting because faster...
But now with Quantum, in my opinion Firefox renders Pale Moon obsolete.

www/midori
Webkit based. I never manage to make it work well. Not developed a lot.

www/qupzilla
Wekbit based, but deprecated. This browser is no more updated because project switched to KDE under Falkon

www/falkon
Webengine (= Chromium Blink engine for QT5) based. Probably the best 'lightweight' alternative, powerfull enough to play youtube

www/qutebrowse
Python written, keyboard driven web browser based on Webkit and/or Webengine

www/lynx
A console Web Browser

www/otter-browser
Can't say much. New web browser based on Webkit and/or Webengine.
It claims to make revival the best things of Opera 12 (presto).... wait and see
 
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Wozzeck.Live said:
www/firefox
Current version is 60. Since 57, Firefox has a brand new and fast engine Quantum. This is now, according to me, the best choice for FreeBSD... and also for Windows and Linux. This is the only Web browser I use accross all my devices.
I use a little Opera (Blink) under Windows and Linux because there is a free embedded VPN, for the rest of time I use Firefox.
As now, Firefox has the same speed as Chromium, perhaps faster. Very stable.
Click to expand...

While it isn't bad, by default its design is horrible IMO, with its huge tab bar and navigation bar.
But after adding few lines to ~/.mozilla/firefox/<your_profile_dir>/chrome/userChrome.css:
Code: 
/* disable blue line on selected tab */
.tabbrowser-tab > .tab-stack > .tab-background > .tab-line[selected=true],
.tabbrowser-tab:hover > .tab-stack > .tab-background > .tab-line:not([selected=true]) {
    opacity: 0 !important;
}

/* reduce minimum tab height */
#tabbrowser-tabs,
#tabbrowser-tabs > .tabbrowser-arrowscrollbox,
.tabbrowser-tabs[positionpinnedtabs] > .tabbrowser-tab[pinned] {
    min-height: 25px !important;
}
and switching interface to compat mode (Customize --> Density --> Compact) it looks pretty OK —
2jijKkD.png

IMO much better than
65F7Kga.png

(userChrome.css lines were tacken from here.)

Also it is good idea to reduce minimal tab width, open about:config and edit "browser.tabs.tabMinWidth" to something more usable, change it to 50 or 60 for example.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I tried different browsers following the suggestions here, notably the remarks of Wozzeck.Live above.

Choosing a browser depends on one's needs. I need a browser for dumb surfing, this forum, twitter, mastodon, but also for managing my bank account. Further I'd like to have as less tools as possible, one GUI web browser should do most jobs. I use a second and lighter browser just to read locally stored HTML-files.

Unfortunately there are a lot of websites that (unspoken) require one of the Big Browsers to use the website properly. This might be something to keep in mind and you might need to test this for your needed websites.

I tried all browsers below on my Acer EL 1200 (AMD Athlon 64 2650e / 1.6 GHz, 2G RAM), not a very potent machine.

firefox is an excellent browser, but consumes far too much CPU and gets questionable remarks on privacy -- both my main reasons to look around and dump it;

midori mostly works well, but can't handle all websites I need properly;

otter-browser is slow loading and has too many hangs and crashes sometimes when organizing my bookmarks. I don't like the absence of export possibility of my bookmarks;

falkon, former qupzilla, looked promising, but also had regular hangs on webpages. Searches from the URL-bar always caused hangs, although it was set in preferences. Main reason to dump it is that pkg sanity check and deleting the software caused my system to hang on it;

seamonkey does a decent job without making my CPU run wild every time. The look and feel remembers me of my first GUI surfing in the Nineties. The extra modules (mail, RSS etc) that I don't need are out of sight and no hindrance;

dillo is my workhorse for locally saved manuals etc. Never lets you down, but makes surfing the web very bare bone;

netsurf-gtk is a similar workhorse, but is better at graphical content. A very good choice when there is no need for JavaScript frills etc, enhancing privacy and security;

lynx is and excellent tool when working in CLI only, and works seamless with tools like newsboat (RSS) and rainbowstream (Python Twitter client).

I hope my review is of any help for others looking for a better browser.
 
choice of gui web browser : none (much too slow unfortunately on a cheap PC)
Web browsers (with GUI) needs quite a lot of hardware power.

"links" would be a good advice to check or to have a look.
 
I am surprised that no one suggested www/deforaos-surfer yet. It has its downsides[1], but for dumb surfing it is still a lightweight graphical browser with javascript support. :)

[1] It crashes when closing a tab while the page is still loading, doesn't play videos and javascript support is not very stable on x86.
 
Chromium for me due to the good works of Google guys Neil Provost (former OpenBSD developer from his Ph.D. student days at the University of Michigan) and Adam Langley

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152871660307018&w=2

Adam Langley blog is good read


https://www.imperialviolet.org/


Now if FreeBSD proper guys could learn to encrypt /tmp by default and do few things Shawn was doing on HardenedBSD you would even have a usable secure desktop. I do share nostalgic feelings by one of the previous posts about Opera powered by Presto engine which was available on FreeBSD but not on Open (speaking of native binaries not Linux emulation crap). It was way ahead of its times.
 
Oko said:
Chromium for me due to the good works of Google guys Neil Provost (former OpenBSD developer from his Ph.D. student days at the University of Michigan) and Adam Langley

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152871660307018&w=2

Adam Langley blog is good read


https://www.imperialviolet.org/


Now if FreeBSD proper guys could learn to encrypt /tmp by default and do few things Shawn was doing on HardenedBSD you would even have a usable secure desktop. I do share nostalgic feelings by one of the previous posts about Opera powered by Presto engine which was available on FreeBSD but not on Open (speaking of native binaries not Linux emulation crap). It was way ahead of its times.
Click to expand...

buuuuu for Chromium: Welcome to the GOOGLE Empire ;)

Google is like Microsoft or Apple. Tie up of users...
 
www/dillo showed promise on Rpi/Rpi2 but development has slowed to a crawl and possibly come to a dead stop by the looks of its developer website.

I'm still using my tried and true SeaMonkey on FreeBSD 10.4 and late 2009 Mac Mini with my original Netscape Communicator mail spool extracted from Windows NT (circa 1994).

As for Firefox, the irony is that it was supposed to be a light and fast dedicated browser replacement for SeaMonkey (then named Mozilla Suite) but has grown to such an extent from the original concept that it now uses more CPU and more memory than the combined SeaMonkey browser, mail client, newsgroup reader, RSS and HTML composer :)
 
trev said:
As for Firefox, the irony is that it was supposed to be a light and fast dedicated browser replacement for SeaMonkey
Click to expand...
Well, no. First there was Firefox. Then came Seamonkey.

Fun fact. When I worked at SGI, James Clark was at the same lunchroom table where he casually mentioned to us there about meeting some guy named Marc about some software for reading stuff on the internet. I didn't understand what he was talking about. Those were the good old days.
 
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drhowarddrfine said:
Well, no. First there was Firefox. Then came Seamonkey.
Click to expand...

In name only.

First there was Netscape Communicator (released 1997; source code released with open source licence by Netscape in 1998), it was then renamed Mozilla Suite (1998-2006), and finally renamed SeaMonkey (2007 when Mozilla decided to concentrate on Firefox). Firefox arrived in 2002.
 
trev said:
www/dillo showed promise on Rpi/Rpi2 but development has slowed to a crawl and possibly come to a dead stop by the looks of its developer website.
Click to expand...
Actually its dillo3 but the port is called www/dillo2
Just because there is not alot of activity does not mean its dead.
I find it works great for some sites. The lightest browser i could find that is standards compliant.
 
Phishfry said:
Actually its dillo3 but the port is called www/dillo2
Just because there is not alot of activity does not mean its dead.
I find it works great for some sites. The lightest browser i could find that is standards compliant.
Click to expand...
Dillo is work of a single Chilean software engineer Jorge Arellano Cid. It started 1999 and never gained any traction. He stopped the work on multiple occasions trying to get some money out of commercial users. He never succeeded. The browser was barely usable in 1999 let alone now. It just recently started supporting frames. IIRC it is not supporting fully CSS.

The only independent browser which is semi-usable at least for browsing this forum is NetSurf. Unfortunately in the real world current choice is Chromium or Firefox. xombrero was very promising but unfortunately Apple and Google effectively closed source WebKit again which killed xombrero.

The real problem is not the lack of skins/GUIs which many incorrectly refer as separate "browsers" but the lack of diversity among web browser engines. Maybe one of many web insiders who frequent this forum can shed some light but in my understanding modern web is so complex that only major commercial entities can develop web engine. Currently the choice is MS Trident, Gecko used by Firefox but which originates in Netscape (which was commercial product and not open source friendly contrary to the picture Mozilla foundation wants to present), and finally WebKit which is semi-closed proprietary Apple/Google product with essentially two different forks used by Chrome and Safari.

For the record Presto engine (used by my beloved Opera browser) was developed by Norwegian post office which almost bankrupted because of it. It is such a great pity that Presto was never open sourced. Above mentioned NetSurf does use its own non-proprietary engine which is remarkable considering the fact that it is a work of volunteers.

P.S. Text browsers are separate topic and I could make a long post about it. They do use their own web engines but they are not as secure as one would think.
 
Oko What has happened is a platform switch from the desktop computer to the clou....err...I mean the web. More people get their information from the web using mobile devices now than the desktop. So the OS no longer matters to the average user and all the power resides in the browser. Therefore, all the efforts to grab that market is wrapped up into who owns the browser.

Of course, you need all the capabilities of a desktop computer platform to garner that and to do so requires a lot of features and functions. So browsers are now as complicated as operating systems which require a lot of manpower to make work on as many platforms as possible including the clou....I mean web.
 
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"dillo" is a good way to go if webpage is basic html, next to netsurf.

likely dillo and netsurf are most common light, fast, web browser with GUI and X.
 
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