New browser review

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

There's a Debian package for Galeon now, so I installed it this weekend.

It's usable.  It's kindof slow starting up, and takes a lot of memory;
initially there were 5 or 6 processes taking up around 32 megs each 
according to top, as soon as I fired it up and went to slashdot (but, 
quite likely those are threads rather than processes, in which case 
the whole thing was probably taking up 32 megs).  Once it's up, at least
you can scroll the pages more smoothly than in Netscape.  The layout 
algorithms appear mostly adequate.  Tables at tvgrid.com (my usual
browser torture test  :-)  seem to come out wider than in Netscape though; 
maybe the word wrap is different or something.  Opening a new window 
takes more time than in Netscape.  I think I got it to crash somehow,
but it's not as delicate as Mozilla.  I might actually try to use this
on a regular basis, but with the high memory usage and lack of speed, 
I think its main advantage over Netscape is going to be that it hopefully
crashes or hangs less.  Another cool thing was that when I started it
for the first time, it offered to import my Netscape bookmarks, and
apparently did it successfully, too.  Even the personal toolbar bookmarks
are now the same.

I also installed Opera beta 1.  Now there's a light, quick browser.  It's
amazing that it is still light and quick when they seem to be using
their own custom GUI toolkit with its own custom pluggable-look-and-feel
framework, shame on them.  Why can't they just use GTK or QT... anyway 
it does come up much faster and is generally more responsive.  It also
has a lot more bugs, and I really don't like the MDI interface.  The
bugs were kindof severe; things like fonts changing for no apparent reason;
on slashdot the main column of articles down the middle of the page would 
start with one width and font, and then a few seconds later after it had
the layout figured out, it would "jump" and resize the widths and change
the fonts to the correct ones.  Sometimes when revisiting a page using
the back button, this change never did take place and it would stay
layed out in "rough" form.  Even in final form the left column on
slashdot overlapped the middle one a bit.  Other pages were done partly
in one font, and partly in another.  In one case this was because
I was using <P> tags between paragraphs instead of the more correct
<P>paragraph text</P> tags; when I fixed that, the font problem went
away.

This version is not ready for prime-time, and even when the bugs are fixed, 
it'll still be quirky.  Maybe worth putting up with on a low-end machine 
though.  I'm still trying to figure out what to put on that P90 Thinkpad 
I posted about here a couple weeks ago.

Both browsers have a "zoom" feature, which is a new idea to me, but
I guess it's kindof cool.  Probably not useful enough to justify putting
it on the main toolbar, though.  In Opera it's a known bug that it
doesn't work correctly yet.

-- 
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