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The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I don't know whether or not this is just me that Ubuntu and/or Xorg is trying to kill, but my latest Intel-graphics honeymoon is most definitely over.

Yesterday I used Aptitude to pull in the latest Ubuntu Karmic updates for the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (with the Intel 82830 CGC, aka 830M). If you'll recall, the last series of updates I installed for Karmic allowed me to use kernel mode setting for the X server, and I was once again able to run Ubuntu (with no xorg.conf, by the way) and have the onboard Intel graphics run as well as they ever have.

But after yesterday's bag full of updates, which were mostly Xorg-related, everything worked OK until the screensaver blanked the screen, after which the screen could not be restored either with the keyboard or mouse.

I haven't yet bothered to return ctrl-alt-backspace functionality to kill the X server in Ubuntu, so I don't know whether or not that would bring X back.

As it stands now, if the screensaver is invoked, I need to do a hard reset with the power button to bring the machine back.

The closest bug I could find is this one specific to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Bug #491302 in Launchpad. I do have a Launchpad account, and I did add a comment to the bug. Right now I'm not running the Ubuntu laptop, so I can't attach dmesg, lspci, etc.

Before setting up the Ubuntu Toshiba laptop, I pulled out the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt (Pentium II MMX 233 MHz, 144 MB RAM) and updated its Debian Lenny system ("customized" with a minimal Xfce desktop), writing this entry via the just-updated Opera 10 browser.

My next course of action with Ubuntu Karmic will be to try the xorg.conf I used in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). Hopes remain low.

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

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.