A grumpy user's browser review

One note before we get going: Konqueror is not included in this review. Konqueror is a highly capable browser (and file manager) which is worthy of consideration, but it suffers from one fatal flaw (from your editor's point of view): it will not run without the whole KDE infrastructure running behind it. Your editor is not currently a KDE user, so Konqueror is not an available option.

This effort was motivated at this time in particular by the announcement of the Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release. Firefox is the new name for the browser formerly known as "Firebird." Those who are curious about the name change can peruse the "brand name FAQ" and this weblog entry describing the lengthy process involved in changing the browser's name.

We'll start, however, with Galeon, which has been your editor's browser of choice for some time. Galeon has been slowly falling out of favor, however, since the 1.3 branch was begun and all the work that went into making 1.2.x a top-quality power user's browser was thrown away. Galeon 1.3 suffers from the GNOME "don't confuse those poor, helpless users by letting them configure things" disease - though it is possible to have more control if you know the proper secret gconf registry codes. Even so, some nice 1.2 features, such as the ability to configure the toolbar for maximal functionality in minimal space or remembering the preferred zoom level for each site, are still missing.

The real problem with 1.3.x, however, is the seemingly endless series of Weird Bugs. The bookmark editor has not worked well for a long time, and rearranging bookmarks can result in strange little windows with URLs in them floating across the screen long after the user has moved on to other tasks. The "type ahead find death grip" has caused your editor to put his fist through more than one monitor while attempting to fill in web forms. The browser grows without limit; it usually has to be killed and restarted around when it hits 200MB or the entire system slows to a crawl.

Despite all these complaints, Galeon has served well for a long time, and will be a hard browser to beat.

The Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release is easy to download in binary form and install. The initial impression it made was not the greatest, however; Firefox appears to be unable to find or use the beautiful Bitstream Vera antialiased fonts that Galeon uses so happily. The result is an ugly, hard-to-read screen which is reminiscent of the old Netscape 4.x days. Firefox behaves this way on Debian sid and Red Hat Linux 9 systems. Comments from others suggest that this is a problem that can be overcome, but it is clearly not a straightforward thing to do. Update: as noted by a few commenters, the fix is to install the "gtk2+xft" version; it can be found on the FTP site but is not mentioned on the download page.

The browser also makes an immediate impression, however, for its speed. Even when freshly started, current versions of Galeon are not so zippy on your editor's desktop. Firefox seems robust; a day's worth of serious browsing failed to turn up a single site which crashed the browser or which did not render properly. Most of the features one has come to expect in a modern browser (tabbed browsing, search fields, printing, bookmark editing, password management, javascript, history tracking with search, etc.) work well. Firefox gives a relatively high degree of control over things like popup windows and active content; there is a list of actions which can be allowed or denied to Javascript scripts, for example. Firefox has far more theme support than the other browsers reviewed.

The browser's process size appeared to stabilize at "only" 98MB; huge by any rational standards, but Galeon has a hard time putting up its splash screen with that much space. Firefox appears to have a solid base at this point.

That said, some things are missing. At the top of your editor's list is the ability to control image animation. One forgets how annoying the web can be with things bouncing around the screen; Firefox provides no evident way to turn animation off. The download manager is a little strange; it provides no way to place a file in an arbitrary directory at download time. Instead, you have to choose a single download directory via the configuration dialogs and everything will go there. By default, downloaded files go into the home directory. Control-T creates a new tab, as one might expect, but it comes up blank; Galeon's practice of bringing up the home page in new tabs seems preferable.

All of the above items would appear to be fixable with a (relatively) small amount of effort. Firefox may not be ready to displace Galeon from your editor's desktop, but it's not far from that point either.

Once this process was begun, it seemed logical to give Epiphany 1.07 a spin as well. Epiphany makes a first good impression; the toolbars are clean and don't take up a whole lot of space, and antialiased fonts are the rule. It's a nice-looking browser. Epiphany, like the other browsers, also offers the usual set of expected features.

Epiphany's configuration dialog is the most sparse of the three browsers reviewed here. It does provide control over the toolbars, which is nice, but many other things are missing - including that all-important control over image animation. There also does not appear to be any sort of explicit control over popup windows. Another obnoxious little limitation with Epiphany is that it does not allow a URL to be "pasted" into the browser with the middle mouse button - a feature supported by both Galeon and Firefox. Epiphany 1.07 suffers from the "typeahead find death grip." Given that many users probably do not use the typeahead find feature at all, it sure would be nice to have an (obvious) way to turn it off.

Epiphany also manifests some strange behavior when the user types a URL into the location field and there are multiple windows open: completion windows show up on each browser window and must be chased away individually. Epiphany grew to over 100MB during a day of testing, and appeared to be set to continue to inflate. It bloats far more slowly than Galeon, however. Beyond that, however, Epiphany seems stable; your editor could not make it crash.

Epiphany is closer to Galeon than Firefox in rendering speed: generally good enough, but not strikingly fast. To try to get a handle on things, we ran an ultra-scientific test: see how long each browser takes to render a local copy of this page, which consists of a huge table listing vulnerabilities and alerts from 2003. Epiphany and Galeon consistently required about 6.5 seconds to present the page; Firefox can do it in 5.4.

Perhaps the most striking realization from this whole exercise, however, is just how similar these three browsers are. The fact that they all use the Gecko rendering engine will certainly create a degree of uniformity, but the resemblance goes beyond that. Your editor often had to look carefully to see which browser was in use at any given time. To a great extent, they can be substituted for each other; the differences between them come down to little nits and pet peeves.

One might well wonder why three groups of people are working so hard to build complex applications which resemble each other so strongly. If we are going to have multiple Gecko-based browsers, it would make some sense for them to differentiate themselves somehow. Why can't one of them be the power user's browser, providing full control over every aspect of its operation without fear of confusing the user with too many configuration options? Couldn't one of them be an experimental browser, trying out interesting new ways of presenting the web to users? We could dedicate one project to each of those goals, and still have one trying to do the Same Old Stuff in the best way possible. As it is, each of the three browsers reviewed is an advanced and capable application, but it is increasingly hard to find a reason to choose one over another.