Recommendations on Lightweight Browsers

[bobross419]

I'm putting together an LFS build on an old laptop just for playing/learning. Its been quite an experience so far, but I'd like to get some sort of browser installed other than links. It serves its purpose, but I'd definitely like something a bit more graphical.

All of the browsers that I've looked at seems to involve installing a lot of dependencies, and I'd like to reduce the bulk. Firefox and Chromium are both pretty heavyweight and the only ones that I'm really familiar with. I've taken a look at Midori and it seems fairly lightweight based on the dependencies, but it does require WebkitGTK and sqllite - Any feedback on these?

I'm having a lot of fun with this project and have XFCE up and running. Is Midori a good, light-weight browser or is there a better open source browser that I haven't come across yet?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jodell88]

Midori is part of XFCE now. Dillo is also a lightweight browser.

 

[Nothinman]

I used to use Ephiphany a good bit, but haven't touched it since I started using Chrome.

 

[Jodell88]

I used to use Ephiphany a good bit, but haven't touched it since I started using Chrome.

Epiphany went to shit with Gnome 3.4.

 

[zokudu]

Opera has no required dependencies under linux. It uses an internal toolkit unless GTK and KDE are present. Though it does require gstreamer to play HTML5 video correctly. If you don't plan on playing HTML5 video though it has no dependencies at all.

 

[lxskllr]

Opera has no required dependencies under linux. It uses an internal toolkit unless GTK and KDE are present. Though it does require gstreamer to play HTML5 video correctly. If you don't plan on playing HTML5 video though it has no dependencies at all.

It's non-free though if that's a concern. I like Midori. I have that setup as a secondary browser. I also have elinks for... well, just cause. It's lightweight, and sometimes it's nice to go text mode :^D

 

[bobross419]

I think I'm going to go ahead with Midori for now. It looks like Epiphany and Midori both rely on Webkit which seems to be the biggest component, so if Midori isn't hacking it I'll already have most of the Epiphany dependencies installed already.

Regarding Opera, I'm not too concerned with non-free software and I did consider going this route... its more just an exercise in what I can do just installing from source though. If it turns out that I end up using this laptop more often I might go ahead and install Opera to handle some sites that don't play well with the lighter weight browsers.

With that said... I took a look at elinks and it looks like it will give a better experience for text browsing than links - Most notably some different colors than just all BW. I'm not averse to using text browsers, especially for reading stuff when I don't want to be distracted by background crap. While I look at some comparisons of text web browsers, does anyone have recommendations on text browsers other than elinks? How does Lynx compare?

Thanks again for the input so far.

 

[lxskllr]

Try links2 also. That has rudimentary graphics support though it can be run in pure text mode also. It kind of splits the difference between a text and graphical browser. I just installed it in Debian, and was warned of a security bug before installing. I didn't read the details, but it's something to be aware of.

Edit:
I decided to look up the bug...

I discovered some out of memory accesses in links2 graphics mode that could be
potentially used to run exploits. I fixed them in links-2.6. For Debian
Squeeze, I am sending this patch that backports the fixes to links-2.3pre1.
Apply the patch and distribute patched packages links and links2 through
security.debian.org.

Debian testing is serving up 2.5-1, so the bug affects that package until it gets upgraded to 2.6. The more you know...

 

[bobross419]

Well, I was able to get Midori up and running. WebKitGTK was a bit of a pain with a 3-4 hour compile time only to have it fail on the install due to GTK-Doc not being installed. After installing GTK-Doc I was able to get WebKit installed. The Midori installation went pretty smooth.

I was able to access and post on Facebook (sad, I know) and get in here. Its actually not too bad. The font is a little off, but I'm sure that can be fixed through config files or something. Overall it seems to be a decent little browser, and all the pages I've tried so far seem to load as fast as or faster than Firefox on my Windows Laptop or my Ubuntu Desktop.

 

[bobross419]

Looks like links2 requires GPM which I've had problems with on this laptop. And elinks won't load forums.anandtech.com with a socket error 🙁

Going to poke around with elinks a bit more. Loving Midori though.

 

[weovpac]

I used Midori for a while and works great, but went back to Firefox once things got better. Another option for a text-based browser is w3m with w3m-img, works great when all you have is tty.