Other free browsers [LWN.net]

Other free browsers

Posted Sep 27, 2006 19:29 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
Parent article: The return of Iceweasel

Although I occasionally start Konqueor (and Opera) I mostly use Firefox, but I have to say that sometimes it can really suck. Perhaps these events are the chance for better technology to catch up a little in terms of user share.

It is simply not acceptable for one browser window to lock up or slow down all other browser windows. It happens all the time with Firefox - when opening PDFs, Java plugins, AJAX apps, etc. When a Java applet locks up (it happens, for example, when opening synchronous sockets in the applet) it is impossible to close the browser window without killing the browser and thus closing _all_ windows.

A more subtle manifestation of the same problem is that opening a second tab in the background makes the current tab visibly sluggish while the other one is loading.

When I have GoogleMail and Writely open in the background, all my browsing slows down noticeably.

As far as I know this is a fundamental design problem in Firefox - everything, even separate browser windows, runs in the same thread using cooperative multitasking. This may have been acceptable initially, but not any more. Unfortunately I think the effort needed to redesign it would be enormous, so it isn't likely to happen.

Does anybody has some insights about the design of Konqueror ? How does it deal with the same issues ?

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Other free browsers

Posted Oct 5, 2006 10:41 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> [In Firefox] everything, even separate browser windows,
> runs in the same thread using cooperative multitasking.

> Does anybody has some insights about the design of
> Konqueror ? How does it deal with the same issues ?

Konqueror can be configured (preferences, performance) to share memory
space (tho I believe it still uses separate threads) or such that each
launched window is a separate instance. (Multiple tabs still share the
same process space. I'm not sure but I think "detached" tabs continue to
share the same process altho they are then separate windows.) I believe
the default is separate processes for web browsing, shared processes for
local file system browsing, but I've been running fully separate processes
for long enough I can't say for sure /what/ the default is.

Another configure option available (same place) for Konqueror is
preloading -- whether to keep "spare" instances in reserve. There's a
checkbox for preloading one instance after KDE startup, another that
enables preloading additional instances every time you use a prelaoded
instance up, and a spinnerbox for configuring the number of instances to
keep preloaded. (I have it set at two.)

Duncan