title: Giving Midori a try link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/giving-midori-a-try/ author: phil2nc description: post_id: 8253 created: 2014/08/19 09:23:07 created_gmt: 2014/08/19 13:23:07 comment_status: closed post_name: giving-midori-a-try status: publish post_type: post

Giving Midori a try

I'm now trying out Midori as my go-to web browser for sanity checking web sites and apps.

Midori is a free, open source, web browser based on WebKit. It is the default browser of elementary OS, a small Linux distro based on Ubuntu.

The browser itself it very lightweight, using a fraction of the memory of Firefox or Chrome.

I'd been using the simple web browser that ships with Gnome, Epiphany, for a while but wanted something that wasn't so closely tied to that desktop environment (mostly due to a contemplated move to MATE when I next rebuild the workstations used at work and home).

The great strength of both the Firefox and Chrome browsers is the dizzying array of useful extensions available for them. Their greatest weakness turns out to be those same extensions, which can cause them to become unstable and crash. While a tiny percentage of crashes in these browsers may be attributable to bad web site coding (yes, that still exists and does still matter), the vast majority are due to errant code in an extension. Of course the number one offender here would be Adobe Flash, but I don't have to tell anyone that (which makes Google's perhaps mortal sin of rolling Flash into Chrome all the more aggregious).

Midori supposedly can use some Firefox extensions, although I haven't yet tested this. My main focus is on seeing how it stacks up against it's bigger cousins as an HTML5/CSS3 compliant browser. Flash capability will definitely not be a requirement for that.

Firefox is big, bloated, slow and tends to crashing on every platform it runs. It is published by an organization that can't decide whether it's a capitalist enterprise or a charitable nonprofit (I guess having "CEO of Mozilla Corporation" looks good on the C.V.). Google Chrome is actually technically very good. Except for its being spyware. One reason I go through the hoops necessary to keep Chromium updated on my Linux and Windows machines is that it allows me to avoid the worst excesses of Google's privacy busting tech.

This doesn't mean that Midori will become the only browser I run, or even the primary one.

But it's nice to have options, because exercising those options is what freedom is all about.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo