It appears that FlashPeak is making serious progress with their SlimJet browser. This is the first time I’ve seen it work this well on Linux.
I’m running Debian 8 (amd64) and I’ve tried both SlimJet and SlimBoat in the past on Debian 7, CentOS 6 and 7, and variations of Ubuntu since around 12.04. SlimBoat is based on the older WebKit and Chrome code base, while SlimJet is based on the most recent versions of the same. Both of them, until recently, were plagued with all sorts of stability and installation issues. They used to crash all the time, in part because too much of it had hard-coded version dependencies on common Linux libraries. So while they claimed this or that package was for Debian, it depended on the wrong version and you had to use the generic package. The generic packages were also frequently unstable. I won’t bother to test their Debian-specific package until they figure out how that works, but the generic one works just fine.
My recent testing of SlimJet on Debian 8 (64-bit) seems to be working quite well. It does one thing you won’t get with Chromium or Google Chrome: A simple switch to turn off animations. That feature used to come with Opera and has been standard on Firefox and Seamonkey for quite some time (if often hidden). But now you can get a very quick loading and rendering full-service browser and still shut down those damned animations without having to monkey with fancy scripting or secret incantations.
I could wish for things like a better default adblocker — they still default to AdBlock Plus, which is one of the worst, most compromised and corrupt projects of its type. The new uBlock is available as uBlock Origin and it works much better. It’s pretty simple to use the extension installer that looks and works just like it does on Chrome/Chromium from the Google Chrome Extension Store. Oh, and SlimJet comes with an optional toolbar button for cleaning your browser cache and cookies. Even better, you have the option to block JScript canvas fingerprinting.
So it’s fast, more stable, and has better security options. I think we can take it seriously now. It’s available for Windows, of course.
