Posted by: spiralofhope | 2009-08-08

A glance at the Midori web browser

http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

The first glance is that this isn’t a real project because it doesn’t have a real website.  But then again, it doesn’t have a stable release yet, so I don’t mind at all.

This is touted as one of those light browsers.  It’s actually quite a complete and usable browser already.

Tested on Unity Linux 0.99-alpha1, updated 2009-08-07

Pretty trivial to compile from source. All the dependencies were in the repository already.

  • I had an odd experience when downloading a firefox archive. It went really slow in Midori, but very fast in Firefox.
  • Uses alt-shift-key for accesskeys. Fail.
    • Strangely, I can alt-s to save when editing.
  • Can’t redefine the hotkeys to use control-tab and control-shift-tab to move between tabs. Fail.
  • Enabling then disabling the coloured tabs plugin leaves the tabs (and new tabs) coloured.
  • Has full javascript, CSS, Flash support.. wow.
  • [1] Has no functionality to remember passwords. Fail.
  • It has an ad-blocking plugin, but there’s no hint as to how one could use it. Argh.
  • Its hotkeys, like changing tabs, works even with flash focused. Yay.
  • There’s no option to keep one tab visible even if there’s only one left.
  • I wish it had keyworded bookmarks.
  • The configure shortcuts plugin
    • Ought to have a search, and ought to be sortable.
    • Ought to let you have multiple bindings for the same command.
  • When viewing pages with flash, it uses just as much memory as Firefox, and a little less CPU cycles.
  • When not viewing pages with flash, it uses a great deal less memory than Firefox.
  • It is faster than Firefox for loading pages.
  • The rendering seems perfect to me. Wikipedia is in its plain mode though, which seems strange.
  • [2] Abandons downloads on exit.
  • Seems to have issues loading some favicons, most likely multiple-size combined-favicons like on spiralofhope.com
  • Can’t C-W when you have only one page left. I am expecting it to blank it.

Overall it’s decent, but it lacks a couple of fundamentals which would prevent my using it as an everyday browser.  The fact that it is better with Flash really gives it a niche use.


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