Browsing on a budget

I’ve been trying to find a perfect browser for use on my XO and have almost exhausted Fedora’s repository ;)

The default Browse activity, based on Firefox 2’s rendering engine, is slow, very resource hungry, doesn’t have tabs and only allows access to the XO’s Journal, not the filesystem.

Midori is nice and fast, since it’s Webkit based, but the file manager doesn’t work :(

Kazehakase was my choice for a while, which can use Gecko (Firefox’s renderer) or Webkit, but it suffers an annoying bug such that it thinks the window is wider than it is, so that constant left-right scrolling is needed to read every line. Zooming in and out and changing the text size don’t help, the lines stay longer than the screen but just fit more characters on them.

Dillo is great: fast, lightweight and turns off unnecessary cruft. However, I find it can be a little too much of a compromise when page layouts are affected.

I thought I’d give Seamonkey a whirl, the latest rebranding of the classic Netscape suite, and I think it’s just about what I’m after. It’s a bit hefty in the resources side, but runs fast, especially once I turned Javascript off. I’m gonna set up the news and mail client too, so that I don’t have to visit any bloody Web sites over and over.

Also, for those using ojp.nationalrail.co.uk , disabling their Javascript crap makes buying train tickets a hell of a lot more straightforward.