Which Browser is the BEST on Pandora?? (Benchmarking)

[thatgui]

Well I guess that answers the question as to whether it's worth the effort of keeping FF working on the Pandora.

Time to find something else to do

NOOOOOO

Sure it is a resource hog, but the wealth of extensions and the possibilty to sync it with my own server makes FF the one and only for me.

 

[ekianjo]

For the article: Excellent comparisons! However -- where's Chromium? Am I the only living soul actually using it? I find it to be quite fast and usable, except for having no downloads, flash or windowed mode.

Cf the article the current Chromium in the repo is only usable in full screen, is part of the Chromium OS and broken as none of the extensions are usable. I would rather have put Chromium for Pandebian if I could (since it was so much better), but that's not something you get from a PND. 

So, no Chromium until someone has the courage to compile the latest version properly for Pandora. 

 

[Michoko]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. Yes I have SZ 1.54, but I had the same issue with at least 1.52. As suggested, I disabled adblock in Arora, but I get the same results (heavy swap, intro page taking forever to load).

My Pandora experience has been getting worse and worse lately, with recent firmwares.
The main issue being heavy swap on the card. Web browsers have been the most impacted by this problem, since they cache many files...

 

[ekianjo]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. Yes I have SZ 1.54, but I had the same issue with at least 1.52. As suggested, I disabled adblock in Arora, but I get the same results (heavy swap, intro page taking forever to load). My Pandora experience has been getting worse and worse lately, with recent firmwares. The main issue being heavy swap on the card. Web browsers have been the most impacted by this problem, since they cache many files...

Have you tried using your card on a different slot, or using a different card? 

Sometimes reformatting the card can help, too. 

 

[Michoko]

I will try and tell you if it improved things, thanks.

 

[pmprog]

I booted Arora up last night, after displaying the window, it then froze (I could maximise/resize the window, but the contents didn't change). Took ages to actually return to being usable.

I also got a dozens of "Certificate" errors trying to navigate to the Facebook login page.

Firefox seemed to run okay last night from the SD card, but to be fair, I only directed it to the Facebook login page like with Arora.

Personally, the Pandora has been my worst experience for browsing the internet. Shame really.

 

[ekianjo]

I booted Arora up last night, after displaying the window, it then froze (I could maximise/resize the window, but the contents didn't change). Took ages to actually return to being usable.


I also got a dozens of "Certificate" errors trying to navigate to the Facebook login page.

You have to disable adblock first. And remove all the adblock lists - that is what is causing the "freeze" (actually it's just loading and updating the list, not freezing). That's the painful thing to do at the beginning.

For the certificate errors, they will occur only once you visit a website and once you are done with it, they will never reappear. 

After that Arora is a smooth ride. 

 

[foxblock]

Thanks for the article.

However, I dislike the reasons for why Chromium and Midori were not included, they could have been tested anyway with a note that they crash "frequently". Though in my experience that is not even the case.

In fact, Chromium is not too bad since it is pretty fast and has a great auto-completing URL bar (awesome on the Pandora as typing with two fingers is slow).

The lack of addons is sad, but for general usage probably not necessary anyway. I personally don't mind that it's a fullscreen "ChromeOS" since I want to browse in fullscreen on the small screen of the Pandora anyway.

Midori also runs pretty fast and it had kinetic in-website scrolling once (aka you could just click and drag inside a website to scroll, could be done with a finger), which for some reason got removed in an update, then added again, then removed again, then...

You are probably right that these browsers have been superseded by current ones, but I think they have some unique features that are worth mentioning. (Since it comes down to personal preference anyway).

For the record, here is an "ultimate" comparison kloplop321 did for PandoraPress quite some time ago, it includes a bunch of obscure browsers which are still floating around somewhere. It might be interesting to compare and see how browsers evolved over time.

Sadly the textual article is gone, so here is only the videos:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=UUZXyS-mNynImBMhU7rnF7tg
(It also shows how absurd FireFox's version numbering has become, since it still was version 4 back then...)

 

[ekianjo]

Chromium is not a proper port in my book since it does not even have proper window closing controls. You have to "sign out" to exit. It does not play very well with the system. Again, I will definitely test Chromium once there is a proper version, but this is not the case yet.

As for Midori it crashes way too often for me to even consider or even test it. Its not stable. Again I would gladly include it once a new version is up. 

 

[JePP]

Chromium is not a proper port in my book since it does not even have proper window closing controls. You have to "sign out" to exit. It does not play very well with the system. Again, I will definitely test Chromium once there is a proper version, but this is not the case yet.

But that is only one more click - I do not quite see the big holdup here. It's something you can get used to quite easily really. There's also a key combo for it.

Also, the extensions argument seems rather invalid - a lot of the tested browsers don't offer extensions support anyway. For Arora you are even suggesting to disable the (only?) available addon, Adblock, entirely to make it work.

I agree that the fullscreen-only mode can be annoying, but as foxblock pointed out, you'd want to browse in fullscreen mode anyway and there are some nice features like the autocompletion that are definitely worth a try!

 

[Loonie]

I'm interested in how their UIs stack up. One feature I like about Firefox is the UI customization. You can reclaim a good chunk of screen real estate, which is important on Pandora.

 

[ekianjo]

I'm interested in how their UIs stack up. One feature I like about Firefox is the UI customization. You can reclaim a good chunk of screen real estate, which is important on Pandora.

I touched upon that point a little bit in screen space usage - but I could elaborate more, true.

 

[fusion_power]

You have to disable adblock first. And remove all the adblock lists - that is what is causing the "freeze" (actually it's just loading and updating the list, not freezing). That's the painful thing to do at the beginning.

For the certificate errors, they will occur only once you visit a website and once you are done with it, they will never reappear. 

After that Arora is a smooth ride. 

Ah, I remember that issue from Arora in the past. But the question remains: how can I adblock without enabled Adblock? And no, I don't want to surf with a gazillion ads and blinking crap on sites so I hope there is a solution for this.

 

[Neelix]

If you don't mind writing to NAND You could try modifying the /etc/hosts file to point most of the the ad server names back to localhost...

mvps.org maintains a hosts file here, that can be mostly just copy&pasted into your /etc/hosts file.  (I recommend keeping your existing localhost entry though)

- Neelix

 

[Zero3K]

Well, a new version of Midori won't happen till the .next firmware is released.

 

[ekianjo]

You have to disable adblock first. And remove all the adblock lists - that is what is causing the "freeze" (actually it's just loading and updating the list, not freezing). That's the painful thing to do at the beginning.
For the certificate errors, they will occur only once you visit a website and once you are done with it, they will never reappear. 
 
After that Arora is a smooth ride. 

 
Ah, I remember that issue from Arora in the past. But the question remains: how can I adblock without enabled Adblock? And no, I don't want to surf with a gazillion ads and blinking crap on sites so I hope there is a solution for this.

Dont visit sites which bloat their pages with ads

 

[pmprog]

Dont visit sites which bloat their pages with ads

Hmmm, that removes 99% of the internet then

 

[ekianjo]

 
Dont visit sites which bloat their pages with ads
 

Hmmm, that removes 99% of the internet then

Dunno. The ones i check dont Have so many ads usually

 

[amyren]

U turn in the pipeline.

And I was going to start on Android JB for 1GHz.

Ah well.

If this was a poll, I would say my vote goes to JB.

Not that I dont want Firefox, but IF I had to choose...

 

[patrick295767]

Of course, I would say :

    All ncurses based browser

They are extremely fast and can be made comfortable to use.