Midori Experiences


mindlord

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*gasp* two new topics by mindlord in the same week? I must be really bored.

Since Midori is going to be the default browser on the P, I figured it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with it and see if it was going to really meet my needs. I used Ubuntu Tweak to add the Midori and Webkit PPA's and installed the lastest and greatest "stable" version. Stable is in quotes because it was anything but a stable experience.

This exercise was performed on two different machines, both running Ubuntu 9.10, the results were the same both times.
* It is freaky fast. REAL fast. Blink and you missed it fast. I can see why people are excited about it. The load time is almost instant on my craptastic work PC, and I swear it starts loading before I click the icon on my gaming rig at home.
* It is freaky small. I was hoping to replace Firefox with it for my daily browsing needs. My requirements are pretty low. I had few pages open and it was using a mere 70MB of RAM which is the least I've seen out of a graphical browser in years.
* It's pretty featureless. Which is bad. Some people will like that no-frills feel, but it lacks gui interfaces to some pretty basic browser stuff, like proxies. Which is very important to me. Things that don't have a gui yet can be edited in the config file, but that's anything but n00b friendly.
* What is doesn't lack is good though. It does support ad-blocking (off by default) and it's easy to set that up. So thumbs up there. It also supports greasemonkey-like user scripts. It's not 100% compatible, but works more or less as expected. It also has a built in user-agent switcher that supports the iPhone profile to save bandwidth and will help render pages better on the P's small screen.
* Speed-dial - a useful feature that deserves it's own bullet. When you open a new tab, instead of a blank page you get nine preview windows with user definable bookmarks in them. So you are just one click away from up to nine of your most visited websites and you don't have to eat up screen real-estate with a bookmark bar. Very smart to include this Firefox plugin-alike, I think.
* !Unstable as hell! - I sincerely hope that it's not this unstable on the Pandora, because DAMN! It crashes early and it crashes often. It's almost completely random, but certain things seem to trigger a crash more often than others. Flash on a website spells certain doom on Ubuntu for some reason. Sometimes just by clicking back on a page Midori will just vanish. Sometimes the vertical scroll bar would just vanish as well, but mostly on IPB based forums (like gp32x.de).

Anyone else tried/current using Midori? If you're happy with it, any tips on stabilizing it? I really like the speed and size, but can't tolerate the instability. I can live with the hard to configure proxies, since I only very rarely need them.
 
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Anyone else thought that this thread would be about the melon liquor?
 
I am actually posting this in Midori from my BeagleBoard.
Pro: It is blazingly fast, as you say. And tiny. With one tab it is taking up 37MB of ram. An additional tab only adds another 2MB.
Con: It doesn't appear to have PNG support. At least not this build. There may be a more updated build that I could get, or simply a plugin that I'm missing. For the most part, it's not a problem. gp32x, however, is full of pngs, so it doesn't look as good as it should.
As for crashing, no idea what you're problem is. The only time it's crashed is when I suddenly find myself out of memory, and I'm pretty sure that's a problem with my kernel. Inactive and cached memory is high, but as soon as freemem runs out, memory requests start getting rejected. Very odd, but I digress.
There's no dictionary that I can find, like there is in Firefox. This is unfortunate. It has support for extensions, and there's quite a few of them, so there could easily be one in there somewhere, I'm just lazy.
 
WizardStan said:
As for crashing, no idea what you're problem is. The only time it's crashed is when I suddenly find myself out of memory, and I'm pretty sure that's a problem with my kernel. Inactive and cached memory is high, but as soon as freemem runs out, memory requests start getting rejected. Very odd, but I digress.
I'm going to try building it from source this weekend and see if that makes a difference.

There's no dictionary that I can find, like there is in Firefox. This is unfortunate. It has support for extensions, and there's quite a few of them, so there could easily be one in there somewhere, I'm just lazy.
If by dictionary you mean spell checker, the version I got from the Ubuntu PPA has a spellcheck feature in the preferences under the behavior tab. It's off by default.
 
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mindlord said:
If by dictionary you mean spell checker, the version I got from the Ubuntu PPA has a spellcheck feature in the preferences under the behavior tab. It's off by default.
Yeah, sorry.
Must be an Ubuntu thing. I can't find it on my build, nor any information about it on the internet.
 
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mindlord said:
* Speed-dial  ... Very smart to include this Firefox plugin-alike, I think.

...


the firefox plugin was a crappy duplication of Opera's functionality
 
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atomicthumbs said:
 
mindlord said:
* Speed-dial  ... Very smart to include this Firefox plugin-alike, I think.
...
the firefox plugin was a crappy duplication of Opera's functionality
And Chrome also implemented it, and I haven't used it any browser, ever. Even in Chrome I have bookmarks and auto-complete, I just don't care for "most recently used" devices.
 
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Nova said:
Anyone else thought that this thread would be about the melon liquor?

Actually thought it was about Midori Linux, the embedded operating system for Transmeta processors built by Linus Torvalds himself where the makefile started a local web server and you opened a browser to configure and build an image. My second guess would have been that sweet green liquer, I'll have an Electric Popsicle barkeep.
 
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I'm all about the ol' Midori Collins with Vodka / Mellonball .. gimme 2 and show me where the stage is at .. ;)
 
Nova said:
Anyone else thought that this thread would be about the melon liquor?

I have no idea why, but actually the first thing I thought was that he tried Microsoft Midori, and for a second I wondered how the heck he had gotten his hands on it. Really weird since it was years ago that I last read something about Midori/Singluarity. It was just when I read his post that I remembered that Pandora's new default browser will be midori.

Hm, looks like I don't really take this browser very serious. Well, for various reasons, I'm not going to use it anyway. But it's nice to read your impressions, even though like virtually everything, I take them with a grain of salt (no offense).
 
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An update to midori came down the tube this morning just as I was about to compile from source that seems to have fixed the stability issue. Although it still has some odd behaviors. Like on these forums when jumping to the last read post in a topic. The page will load and correctly jump to that post, but as soon as the "beautification" javascript in IPB kicks in Midori leaps back to the top of the page. So bizarre.
 
My final report on Midori

It's a fine browser, still not as feature complete as I'd like. The crashing issues have completely dissappeared, but so did the ad-blocking functionality. It's configured and turned on, but doesn't work. I'm probably to blame there and I should probably delete my .midori directory and re-configure. I've commited myself to using it over Firefox for at least a month now that it doesn't crash. The speed is just too nice to pass up on. I don't think I have much else to report other than that, Pandora users should be happy overall.
 
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