I need a "sane" webbrowser.
Firstly, I'm not interested in rolling releases. In my experience,
Firefox 3.6 was the pinnacle in browsers, in the days when Epiphany
was also a fine option. Things appear to have gone downhill bigtime
since then, as far as I can tell.
Seeking something that is 100% libre, and supported in Debian Wheezy,
to install and admin/maintain for Debian deployments which I do
occasionally for friends and for a human rights association that I
volunteer at (upmart.org). I have been unable to deploy anything for
six months (besides time constraints, I am struggling with finding a
modern desktop, voip client etc - but I don't want to hijack my own
thread here...)
What I've tried:
* Iceweasel 10 LTS
used for 6 months - I have been running wheezy/testing for 6 months,
and about two weeks ago switched to sid/unstable - I can put up with
various problems for an extended period of time, but I wish to reach
"deployability" for others not technically versed as I am.
Problems: every now and then, firefox causes a core or two to hit 100%
for a couple seconds, causing the fan to spin up (and this, with no
pages loading, animations stopped, no java, no javascript etc, only
scrolling up and down a single tab/page - eg gmail static (my rural
link too slow for javascript)) - this looks like a GC (garbage
collection) type artifact, and is so obtrusive that I've decided it's
a deal breaker.
The following browsers I've been trying over the last day:
* Midori (using now)
Not showing the tabs
Private browsing option doesn't remember settings (at least, I've
tested proxy setting); tabs do not show at all - I've tried each
binary Preferences setting for always display tabs, then restarting
midori, but no joy.
btw, midori -p does show it's tabs.
Thankfully, CTRL-PgUp/PgDown does cycle amongst tabs, but not seeing
them is a deal breaker.
* Netsurf
Has wacko keybindings: CTRL-PgUp/Down does not change tabs;
CTRL-RightArrow/LeftArrow does change tabs (so when editing in a field
eg writing an email, I cannot jump a word at a time, nor select a word
at a time!); tab key does not include going from address bar to search
bar/field; keyboard scrolling of page does not work well/ sometimes I
can't seem to keyboard scroll at all; I had difficulty copying an
email address off a page (no right click menu option for this).
This keyboard firetruckery is a deal breaker.
* Epiphany
Epiphany. How I loved epiphany back in the days of Gnome 2 and Firefox
3.5, when I took a walk on the wild side of Ubuntu, and settled in on
Ubuntu 8.04.
Firefox 3.6 managed to provide enough reasons use it predominantly.
Back to the present: Epiphany is not showing its toolbar icons; it has
a whole menu bar with a single "Web" menu. There's a different menu
behind one of the faceless icons on the icon bar.
* Luakit
I installed this, started it up twice, and would love to learn it (I
use vim for most of my editing).
Unfortunately, this browser demands learning its ways, so it is not
suitable for general deployment. As technically gluttonous as I'd like
to be in satisfying my own power-user needs, there are other higher
priorities in my life - facilitating community actions and community
helpers/ volunteers, to do their good work in a relatively secure
environment. This means I must be eating the dog food I deploy.
For me to get to deployment, in this so modern era of amazing omg
integrated unified cross-device ponies and "So, are you ready for
BYOD?" desktops ... well, it hasn't been possible for me in the last
year. This is incredibly frustrating; battling default samba
configurations is one thing, but I can't even find a deployable
browser, consistent XP-style UI "experience" etc.
Sorry, sorry, I'm ranting again! I promise I'll keep it to browsers.
There are plenty of other threads we _could_ create.
TIA,
Zenaan
PS: For those who, like me, didn't know what "BYOD" meant before
yesterday: Bring Your Own Device.