Recently in Browsers Category

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

I can edit images all day long in the GIMP and not tap out my CPU or RAM like I do when using Firefox to hit all the Web pages and software-as-a-service type sites (heavy, heavy Javascript) to get my work done.

And this is in Linux, specifically Ubuntu at present. I've run into the same problem in Windows. You start with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and before too long your machine is running like crap.

I spent a bit of time today running most of the browser I have on my Ubuntu 9.04 system, most of which are based on the Gecko engine (Firefox, Epiphany, Galeon), one of which is not (Opera).

And I kept track of how they use CPU resources and memory via the handy Htop utility (top works just as well but isn't nearly as pretty; and you know how I like pretty).

Firefox, no surprise hogs the most CPU on my 1.3 GHz Celeron system (with 1 GB RAM). It's often at 90 percent or more of CPU and rarely dips below 40 or 50 percent. The more pages and the more Javascript and Flash (that's a really killer), the worse it is.

I'm not going to talk so much about memory because with 1 GB, I'm fairly comfortable. With Firefox running, about 400-500 MB is in use; the other browser generally use 200-300 MB.

The other Gecko browsers — the GNOME-supplied Galeon and Epiphany — also spike up to 90 percent when "intensive" things are happening — new pages being loaded, scripts executing, but they quickly "settle" down to 20 percent of CPU and sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Not surprisingly, Opera fared better. The free yet proprietary browser can still use a lot of CPU (in the 90 percent range) during heavy operations. But the difference I see in Opera (I'm running version 10 for Linux and also recommend it for Windows and Macintosh) is that once that instance of heavy use is over, Opera is very quick to give up those CPU cycles and return to a very refreshing 3 to 10 percent of CPU.

However, once the Flash plugin is invoked, all bets are off and Opera is as doggy as anything. It's really Flash that does the damage ... but damage it is. Flash is just plain evil in a box, especially in Linux.

I haven't been as smitten with the Webkit engine, or more specifically the Google Chrome Web browser, as some. In Windows XP with 3 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM, it starts out great but has quite a bit of trouble redrawing the screen in comparison to Firefox once I've been running it for awhile.

I'll certainly keep an eye on Webkit in Linux — Epiphany is supposed to be moving to that engine.

But what I'd like to say once again is that on today's Web, running a browser is quite an intensive operation that requires a whole lot of resources in order to cause as little relative pain as possible to your system — and your nerves.

And there's nothing light about it.

Coming up: One of the 63 dependencies involved in installing digiKam on my GNOME-based, previously KDE-free Ubuntu system is the Konqueror browser. I'll have to try that. And I just added the uber-minimal-GUI-browser Dillo. We'll see how that cuts said mustard.

Here's the deal. I've been using one of my two nearly identical Toshiba 1100-S101 laptops for a growing share of my day-to-day work, and not just at home.

The degradation of my Windows XP-running Dell box over the course of the day (OK, it's not that great in the morning after a fresh boot, either) has driven me to use my older, slower laptops, which under non-Windows OSes actually do things better and faster.

I basically resurrected both Toshibas from death in the form of recycling, which is what would have happened to them had I not pulled them from the haul-me-away pile. Both had XP installed. Until this point, I didn't have any personal machines running XP, and if you don't count the Windows 2000-running Pentium II box I rarely turn on, these are really my only Windows-running PCs I use besides my main work box — the one that barely works.

Think of that last paragraph as somewhat of an explanation for why I'm dual-booting both laptops, the first into OpenBSD 4.4 and the second, as of this afternoon, into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I really have little use for Windows, but in the course of whatever it is that I do in these blog entries and my print column, I just might need a Windows machine. Or not. Since I can't reinstall Windows XP whenever I wish due to not having an install CD, I'm leaving those now-shrunken NTFS partitions intact until I decide a) I really need the disk space or b) figure out how to get the hard drives out of the Toshibas and put them aside in the unlikely event that I absolutely need to run XP some time in the far future.

I've sung the praises of the Opera Web browser many a time. It's a great deal lighter than Firefox, it renders most Web pages well, and most importantly for me, it enables me to use a critical Web-based application that is designed to only work with Internet Explorer, which I try to run as little as possible (and which isn't an option in OpenBSD).

In OpenBSD, Opera is run with the Linux compatibility layer, so it's basically a Linux binary when it comes into the system from ports.

And up until now, I've had no problems with it.

But lately, Opera has been either crashing itself or crashing X.

I can see in top in an xterm window that processes with the name operapluginw (or some other letter after "plugin") can eat 90 percent of CPU and bring the whole laptop to its knees.

Most of the time I can kill the processes in a terminal and then restart Opera right away. Sometimes I can restart the Fvwm window manager from the menu. Other times I have to kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace.

I don't know if the problem is with this specific build of Opera (version 9.51, build 2061), the many packages that allow OpenBSD to run Linux binaries in i386 (including fedora_base and fedora_motif), or something inherent to this hunk of hardware, a 2002-era Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop. It could even be something specific to the software-as-a-service type application I'm primarily accessing with the Opera browser.

Right now the problem is manageable, and I will be testing Opera again in Linux (preferably Debian) very soon.

Due to the inherently quirky nature of our particular development environment, many of my co-workers have been using Opera heavily. The problem I'm reporting here is in OpenBSD only. I haven't seen it in Windows (or previously in Linux). Again, it could be something with the Linux compatibility portion of OpenBSD (this is the only Linux app I'm running), or Opera itself.

In all likelihood, I'll continue running Opera in OpenBSD and see if the problem clears up in the next version of the OS.

And I didn't mention it until now, but my other "main" browsers on this OpenBSD laptop is Firefox 2. In OpenBSD 4.4 for i386, there are packages for both Firefox 2 and 3, but I chose FF 2 for no other reason than that it was still available, and in Unix-like environments I haven't really seen the need to go from FF 2 to 3 if I don't have to.

And Firefox 2 has been extremely solid in OpenBSD 4.4. If I could use it for everything (or could figure out what's ailing Opera), I'd be very happy indeed.

Frustration with my Windows XP box at the office has prompted me to do more and more work at the office on this Toshiba laptop, which happens to have OpenBSD as its primary OS. (I didn't remove Windows XP from the laptop, but I don't use it, either.)

I've never previously used/abused this hardware and OS to the same extent, and in a sense it's a test of the Toshiba, OpenBSD and the applications.

As I recently reported, the whole thing has the potential to run great. If I really needed constant access to Flash video and other such nastiness as Microsoft .NET (which unfortunately I sometimes do), I'd be in a bit of trouble using this platform. I don't even really need Java all that much, but I could install it from ports if things change.

Before I close out this rambly entry, let me remind the reader that one of the things that prompted me to run OpenBSD on this laptop was the balky CD/DVD drive that hates 9 out of 10 CDs I burn for it (and yes, those CDs work fine on other PCs). Even OpenBSD's install CD wouldn't work, so I was able to use the floppy image to boot the system and install over the network.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.