Debian Squeeze: Browser Wars

All browsers suck. Some suck less than others, but none of them are actually good. (Note the sarcasm warning.)

I’ve been testing and tweaking the various graphical browsers available for Debian Squeeze: Iceweasel, Epiphany, Iceape, Opera and Google Chrome. The Chromium version available is simply too old and not slated for update, as far as I know.

The primary flaw with old reliable Iceweasel (Firefox) is it tends to drag on pages using a lot of JScript. Loads good, but when you scroll, it’s glacial and jerky. Selecting smooth scrolling only makes it smoother at being slow. I’m watching the CPU meter spike with each tiny twitch of the mouse wheel. This is unacceptable to me simply because I know they can do better, and have chosen not to bother. None of the others do this.

The related Iceape (Seamonkey) project is slightly better, but suffers the slower pace of development. Too many things on too many sites, particularly with heavy JScript, just don’t work. Controls written into the page don’t appear in the display because developers haven’t gotten around to implementing them.

Epiphany suffers the major plight of all GNOME related packages. If you aren’t on the rolling release bandwagon, you aren’t simply dis-invited, you are given a hostile reception. GNOME developers are downright snotty about this. So when Debian chose their freeze point for stability, that meant the better features, which had been missing for some time, were not included because the GNOME devs held that stuff back for the next release. Epiphany needs Flashblock, and without it, it’s a piece of trash. Without the ability to stop the distractions built in by the unconscionably evil advertisers, the developers are deservedly suspected of being in bed with them. If it’s complicated for the user to implement, it’s because the devs don’t care what users want. It’s actually easier to simply block Flash objects via CSS than to get any sort of Flashblock control working. I sound unforgiving because that’s the what GNOME people understand. (The underlying GTK toolkit is much more forgiving.)

Google Chrome is a moving target. You may have heard the latest news about the 10 beta being faster than ever. Fine, but so far, Chrome still suffers from this persistent inability to cooperate with some websites on which not a single other browser has trouble — unable to load linked pages, incomplete loading of images, etc. This is partly the blame of the Webkit folks, but without the extensions which limit advertising and other useless page crap, we might as well all restrict ourselves to text mode browsers and forget it. If those extensions in Chrome cause page loading errors, I’m not so sure it’s the fault of the extensions in every case. When Chrome developers dare to suggest to Windows users they have to turn off their anti-virus to get pages to load, when not a single other browser requires that, it’s because Chrome is junk. With all the tricks and troubles I’ve had to explore getting Chrome to work as it should, I recommend you avoid it, because these folks are just playing games.

Which brings us to Opera. Yes, I’ve had mountains of trouble with Opera, too, over the years. The biggest boondoggle continues to be the dirty hacks they find necessary to get multimedia objects loaded into the proper player within the browser. Opera’s developers act like they have never seen Linux or BSD. Yet, when help is offered, they seem to be almost bloodthirsty in how they treat volunteer developers, going by the comments made by such volunteers later. There are still major issues with keyboard input, particularly with input fields on webpages. The new pure-X interface is still not half as good as the older QT version, because it’s slower and the widgets don’t work as well. The much ballyhooed extensions are uniformly worthless under Linux and BSD.

Yet for all my complaints, I still end up with Opera being the least annoying of the lot. The one redeeming virtue is the ability to control the most annoying elements on the fly. I can put any preference controls I want on the bottom of the browser frame. I typically have these:

• Enable Plug-ins
• Enable JavaScript
• Enable Cookies

I tend to keep cookies and plug-ins turned off on most pages, and often hit the JavaScript switch after the page loads to prevent the constant reloading business built into some elements of many webpages. Opera had the ability to turn off animated GIFs a long time ago. And who hasn’t needed to occasionally invoke the “wrap text to width” on some badly formatted pages? Best of all is the selective blocking of images without any silly addons or extensions.

Finally, while Opera may not fix every bug you claim to find, their bug reporting process is about the easiest and most sensible thing I’ve ever seen. It seems the Opera folks do understand one thing: Users are their lifeblood. I hope they never lose that single most important feature of their operation.

Addenda: Further testing confirms a suspicion I did not mention above. After using several different WebKit browsers, I find all of them share one very major flaw: At some point in your surfing, they simply stop loading some pages. It won’t matter whether I middle-click on a link to load a page in a new tab or simply move to the new page in the same tab, too often the page simply does not load. Trying to reload, or waiting a bit and trying again do not help. Once WebKit decides the page is blank, or decides to exclude certain elements, it refuses to do any different. Yet trying the same action on the same pages and links in any other browser works just fine — always.