There are some who are constantly looking for the fastest, smallest, least resource hungry program to get a job done. These are the kind of people who use Wordpad, or Abiword, instead of Microsoft Word, Gnumeric instead of Excel, and Chrome instead of Internet Explorer, or Firefox.
These people have helped Chrome grow quickly and be revised frequently, seeing that it has gone in very short order, from revision 1 to revision 4, in under 2 years time. But there is a grumbling I’ve heard lately, saying that with all of the additional useful features, Chrome is becoming as large as some of the other browsers, and it is certainly losing its speed advantage, as the latest tests show it is only about 10% faster than Opera 10 (as reported by Ars Technica).
What is the proponent of ‘lean and mean’ to do? One possibility is a switch to Midori, the new, really minimalist browser based upon Webkit, which promises to stay lean and mean.
from ghacks.net
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. Those are the usual web browser names that make the news these days on the Internet. This are also the web browsers that the majority of web users use actively. Other web browsers face this tough competition. Last to feel the competition was the Google browser which – despite Google’s marketing power and efforts – remains at the lower end of web browser distribution.Other web browsers on the other hand do usually not have the backing of a multi-billion Dollar corporation. That’s why they need to come up with other means to grab web browser market shares.Midori’s approach is the lightweight but still comfortable web browser. The portable web browser is based on WebKit which is also used by Google Chrome and Safari. This guarantees great page rendering speeds. One of the greatest benefits of the web browser is its low resource usage. The browser uses about 10 Megabytes of computer memory with one open tab which is not much when compared to the resource usage of other web browsers that use a multiple of that.
The speed and low resource usage does not affect the functionality of the web browser. It offers many of the features that web users demand including tabbed browsing, session management, bookmark management or extension, userscript, userstyles and theme support. Not everything is yet fully support though. Userscripts for example are supported as long as they do not use advanced metadata. This means most are supported while some are not.Midori is an interesting web browser, especially for users who prefer bare bone systems that are resource friendly and therefor faster than comparable products. The web browser is available for Linux and Windows and can be downloaded from the developer’s website.
Browsers have not always been so bloated, and Midori shows that it does not have to be. If Midori catches on, perhaps we will see new ‘lite’ or ‘retro’ versions of favorites, like Firefox or Internet Explorer. After all, not many would dispute the fact that Internet Explorer, though possibly heading in the right direction with version 8, could still stand a weight reduction, as it is still the pig of all modern browsers. (yes, we heard about the new, improved Microsoft Gazelle, but it seems to either be shy, or has, like its namesake, been devoured by a hungry lion. We wait to be amazed.)
I can’t see the usage of Midori for every day chores, but, for that trip where the USB stick becomes the working environment, it certainly can have a place at the table. (As the above describes, Midori already supplies things that Chrome does not, in a smaller, tighter package.)
§
•
•
