I am kind of getting sick of every modern browser taking hundreds of MB of RAM for no reason and being bloated with shitware.
I will research a bit how quickly I could put together a minimalistic web browser (maybe using Webkit) with a few simple features that most people seem to use. I will call it
Cyclone. Here is a feature list that seems reasonable.
- tabs
- pinned tabs
- search index
- speed dial
- history
- download manager
- sessions
- password remembering
- cookies
- cache setup
- memory management
- Javascript disable
Which features would you like to see in a web browser like that? Remember, this is not a web browser for development or anything else. It's just a simple browser for everyday usage. In fact I am secretly hoping that Webkit kinda already supports most of this stuff already (e.g. cookies).
Don't forget "Local Storage", the modern version of cookies, I know quite a few sites that use it.
and if your going to enable Javascript use the V8 engine.
and F11 full screen functionality would be good. I at least often put my browser into full screen to read.
other than that that sound like a competent list of features.
Flash, while tipicaly necessary in a browser doen't NEED to be included if you making a light weight meant for general browsing. if you want flash switch to chrome.
What about Chromium? It is supposed to be pretty lean, and open source.
Chrome and it's open source version chromium obtains it's speed by taking up massive amounts of ram. I personalty don't care as I have 16GB to throw at it to make it run smooth with 100+ tabs open. but to each their own.
On average Chrome used 3 times more ram than Firefox and Firefox uses 50% more Ram that opera.
That Said with the recent HTML 5 things I've been testing just to mess around Chrome wins hands down in the Render performance sector with opera hardly able to keep 15 FPS under lght load and Chrome maintaing a steady 60 under heavy Canvas rendering (provided you have the ram).
all in all it hard to make a definitive "This browser is the best" statement.
Judging by recent experience when it comes to normal usage Chrome, FF, and IE10, all have equivalent performance with Opera and Safari being moderate competators.
Chrome feels snapyer to me (bias non withstanding)
However on my netbook which is by no means a beast of computers( even if it IS a beast of it's class) I would REALLY like a truly 'lite' browser Chrome overloads the ram and it gets compairitvely sluggish (by that I mean it feels like I'm useing IE7). FF ends up pushing the processor to it's limits with any sort of simi heavy javascript (CP's snow for example) that common on more modern websites or flash
so, if a browser had a truly light footprint while having a snappy render speed, even if it didn't support flash I would use it on my more Ram limited computers.
Shit, flash support is an important factor after all. :/ I'm not sure how that could be pulled off.
well chrome literally embeds it's own I suppose you could do something similar, save for the possible licensing problems. other than that embedding flash in an application has answers all over the internet http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060679/cross-platform-flash-player-embedding. it's even a windows COM component. after all Most flash in windows browsers is just a Active X control. but of course there is the firefox version of flash that's not... not sure but you MAY be able to piggyback off Firefox's flash like Chromium does
What about security, though? I like chrome because it literally blocks all viruses before they get to me.
I'm pretty sure that's your anti-virus and not Chrome.
https://www.google.com/search?q=does+chrome+block+viruses
however it IS true that Chrome has one of the most secure sandboxes around in the browser world.
Yeah, what ryex said :P
I don't know, I just feel that IE is super vulnerable compared to chrome.
On the flip side, I'd "totes" use this as long as it looks cool :P
I'm not sure how much work it would be to make a browser using WebKit. xD
EDIT: Are there any other relatively simple features that you would like to see in a light weight web browser like this? Since I am trying to keep this really a to a total minimum, I will completely strip down other features. So I should mentioned that I do plan to add very basic stuff such as a home page, back/forward buttons and shortcut keys for e.g. new tab, but generally I won't add all those options that Chrome, FF or Opera have.
And I just remembered another feature: Password wizard.
There is nothing, really important anyways, that I would need in a browser...other than like...flash/java support. Unless this is meant to be strictly a text/pictures browser. I'd like that actually...no annoying popups would be able to load >:D
I just might. xD
In my opinion, a function every browser absolutely needs is incognito mode. For... stuff... :naughty: I'd definitely call that 'day to day use'.
Well look what I just saw:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/google-forks-webkit-and-launches-blink-its-own-rendering-engine-that-will-soon-power-chrome-and-chromeos/
Not the same thing, but related, so I thought it belonged in this thread.