Fooling around with Midori
Over the years, I’ve used a lot of Web browsers. Most of them are dead and gone, and most people probably haven’t heard of many of those browsers. So, when I run into a new (at least, for me) browser my friends shake their heads. They can’t understand my curiosity.
And that curiosity was piqued a week or so ago. I was going back and forth about browsers on identi.ca. In one dent, I mentioned that tried I’d a browser called Midori and hadn’t been impressed.
Somehow, that got the attention of one of Midori’s developers. He dented, suggesting that I try installing the browser from the project’s PPA. I gave it a shot. And even though I’ve only been using Midori for a week and a bit I am impressed.
Speed, speed, speed
Right out of the gate, Midori is one of the fastest browsers I’ve ever used. Faster, even, than Epiphany. Much of that speed can be attributed to the framework on which Midori is built: WebKit. If you want to know more about WebKit, go here.
Midori is generally very fast. It starts quickly, and loads most pages faster than just about anything I’ve used in the past. Sometimes Midori takes a little longer to load pages with a lot of multimedia content. I’ve seen it slow down on pages with a lot of Javascript and images.
On top of that, Midori renders pages as well as any browser out there. The only page with which I’ve run into rendering problems has been my Google Profile. Even then, those problems have been inconsistent. Sometimes it will render well, and other times not so much.
Features
To be honest, I’m not a features guy. Generally, the more you pack into an application the less appealing it will be to me. I like my apps purpose built, and following the 80/20 (or, at least, 70/30) rule. And Midori is just that.
One of the features that I find interesting is the extensions. These aren’t like the extensions you’d find in Firefox, but they can be useful. Midori’s extensions include:
- Feed Panel, which lets you read Atom and RSS feeds
- Colorful Tabs, which tints tabs in the interface a different colour so you can better distinguish them
- Cookie Manager, which lets you view and delete cookies
- Statusbar Features, which add buttons to the bottom panel of the browser. The buttons enable you to toggle Netscape plugins, automatic loading of images, and scripts
Multimedia
As I mentioned earlier, Midori deals with most multimedia quite well. It handles Flash content, as well as pages created with AJAX. The only drawback, according to the developer with whom I was trading dents, is lack of a Java binding.
Summing up
Since I installed Midori, two or three updates have come down the pipe. They’ve actually made the browser a little faster and a little more stable. Not that it was slow or unstable to begin with.
I’ve found that I’ve been using Midori more and more. While I’ve been using Epiphany quite extensively over the last while, Midori is taking up more and more of my browsing time. And there are a few features that I still want to explore. Not that I’m complaining …
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June 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 am
I used to be subscribed to the Midori PPA, but I dropped it. Some design decisions like placing a not-all-too-important checkbox in a very visible area, lack of some plugins and the development trend made me forget it.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
You do know that Epiphany is in the transition process to a webkit backend, don’t you?
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
@ReinoutS Yes, I do. However, the WebKit versions of Epiphany that I’ve tried have been … well, let’s just they left me a bit underwhelmed. Keeping an eye on the WebKit version though.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
[...] is fast. I thought that Epiphany and Midori were quick (and they are), but Chromium leaves them in the dust. The browser starts quickly, loads [...]