Lightweight browsers
Let's take a look at web browsing monsters like Firefox, Opera, IE and look at a few young projects based on the WebKit library.
For starters, a few words about WebKit itself. This is the engine used to render pages of the notorious Safari . Once it was forked from KHTML, the Konqueror engine, refined and used for its own purposes (with pathos, I must say: one of the arguments in favor of Safari, according to Apple, was the "Open-source rendering engine"), and part of and additions have been made and back to KHTML. After that, WebKit got its current name (once WebCore) and now continues to be developed.
This library is remarkable in that it is comparable to Opera in terms of processing speed, built after KHTML, based on web standards , distributed under the LGPL-2 license, and has already managed to recommend itself in Safari and the built-in Symbian 9 browser.
The list of applications tells us about such open webkit-browsers working under Linux, like Arora , Atlantis , Midori . But earlier Kazehakase and Epiphany were also listed there. Google also offered FoxKit .
So, 6 browsers. Two (Arora and FoxKit) on Qt, the rest on Gtk, FoxKit is tied to KDE4, Epiphany and Atlantis to Gnome. Since I use KDE and do not have a Gnome, I was able to assemble and study only four of the six browsers.
It should be noted that Kazehakase and Midori have a built-in download manager (I really didn’t test it).
Conclusion: At the moment, you can apparently use two of the six browsers with WebKit based on - Arora and Epiphany (confirm?). But it’s not so smooth with them either - the first one will not work for youtube, the second one may not guess the encoding on the Russian-language site. But you can already see that Apple has not in vain done the work on the library - there should be easy browsers!
')
Epilogue: When FF3 came out, I drove it a little on the characteristic pages. It began to work noticeably faster than FF2 and a bit slower than the Konqueror, while it began to slightly break up some of the WWW pages. I got the impression that Mozilla took a lot of code from WebKit, but I'm not sure about that. If this is true, you should be happy for the standardization of browsers - a little bit more, and FF will process HTML in the same way as Safari, Opera (which seems to be developed on the basis of standards), made on the basis of many expect IE8. And then come the happiness of the designers - everything is as it should be everywhere.
UPD: Under Win, besides the safari was Swift , but died, and Arora is also quite relevant, because it was written on extremely cross-platform Qt4. Plus there is a KDE4 for Windows project in which there is Konqueror.
PS Please do not incite Opera vs. Holivar FF vs. Safari and others like them - the topic, rather, is intended to familiarize yourself with new software for those who are interested. Maybe some of the programmers will turn their attention to one of the projects and help them develop faster?
For starters, a few words about WebKit itself. This is the engine used to render pages of the notorious Safari . Once it was forked from KHTML, the Konqueror engine, refined and used for its own purposes (with pathos, I must say: one of the arguments in favor of Safari, according to Apple, was the "Open-source rendering engine"), and part of and additions have been made and back to KHTML. After that, WebKit got its current name (once WebCore) and now continues to be developed.
This library is remarkable in that it is comparable to Opera in terms of processing speed, built after KHTML, based on web standards , distributed under the LGPL-2 license, and has already managed to recommend itself in Safari and the built-in Symbian 9 browser.
The list of applications tells us about such open webkit-browsers working under Linux, like Arora , Atlantis , Midori . But earlier Kazehakase and Epiphany were also listed there. Google also offered FoxKit .
So, 6 browsers. Two (Arora and FoxKit) on Qt, the rest on Gtk, FoxKit is tied to KDE4, Epiphany and Atlantis to Gnome. Since I use KDE and do not have a Gnome, I was able to assemble and study only four of the six browsers.
- Arora
This browser has been forknited from a demo browser showing the ease of use of WebKit built into Qt-4.4. As it should be, now lives its own life and suffers from the fact that qt-webkit is somewhat lagging behind webkit-gtk.
Pros: Looks good among Qt / KDE applications, saves sessions.
Cons: qt-webkit does not support plugins yet, for some reason Shift + wheel does not scroll by page, webkit does not pass old - Acid3 does not work - Foxkit
One programmer decided to write a browser on qt-webkit, but in order to keep up with Arora a mile, he decided to use kdelibs features. I was able to collect this miracle only after replacing uint (x) with (unsigned long) x in all source codes (sharpened for 32 bits, apparently). I did not find the navigation bar, although it is present in the screenshot of the author.
Pros: KDE integration
Minuses: I had to patch, did not find the Location Bar, minuses Arora are also in force - Midori
Perhaps the most well-known currently webkit-browser, not counting Safari, because before all began to somehow work. Written from scratch (of those considered here, perhaps, the only one), is being actively developed. I have compiled version 0.0.19 with webkit-gtk-0_p35417, all from Gentoo ports. The developer warns of instability due to the constant changes in the WebKit API, which is fully confirmed in practice.
Pros: nice interface, support for netscape plug-ins, a large number of potential settings.
Cons: Instability (not the fault of the author), problems with encodings - see the screenshot for Kazehakase - Kazehakase
The oldest of the four browsers reviewed, the main goal is correct support of the Japanese language on the pages. From birth, he knows how to work with gecko, once he knew how with WebCore, and now he learned how to use WebKit. It is assembled from Gentoo ports without any complaints (0.5.5-r1), the interface is well thought out, and has many settings. There should be plug-ins too, but I have something with my hands, apparently - a friend in Midori had.
Pros: like Epiphany, supports two engines to choose from. Very flexible in behavior.
Minuses: when working with WebKit, you must specify the protocol (“http: //”, for example), the download control does not work (Stop, for example). Again, the encoding; The browser begins to respond adequately to your actions only after a careful processing of the settings by the file.
It should be noted that Kazehakase and Midori have a built-in download manager (I really didn’t test it).
Conclusion: At the moment, you can apparently use two of the six browsers with WebKit based on - Arora and Epiphany (confirm?). But it’s not so smooth with them either - the first one will not work for youtube, the second one may not guess the encoding on the Russian-language site. But you can already see that Apple has not in vain done the work on the library - there should be easy browsers!
')
Epilogue: When FF3 came out, I drove it a little on the characteristic pages. It began to work noticeably faster than FF2 and a bit slower than the Konqueror, while it began to slightly break up some of the WWW pages. I got the impression that Mozilla took a lot of code from WebKit, but I'm not sure about that. If this is true, you should be happy for the standardization of browsers - a little bit more, and FF will process HTML in the same way as Safari, Opera (which seems to be developed on the basis of standards), made on the basis of many expect IE8. And then come the happiness of the designers - everything is as it should be everywhere.
UPD: Under Win, besides the safari was Swift , but died, and Arora is also quite relevant, because it was written on extremely cross-platform Qt4. Plus there is a KDE4 for Windows project in which there is Konqueror.
PS Please do not incite Opera vs. Holivar FF vs. Safari and others like them - the topic, rather, is intended to familiarize yourself with new software for those who are interested. Maybe some of the programmers will turn their attention to one of the projects and help them develop faster?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/37162/
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