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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] Phoenix and ftp sites
From:       "Bruce J.A. Nourish" <kode187 () kode187 ! net>
Date:       2003-01-26 7:07:04
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On Saturday 25 January 2003 09:51 pm, Collins Richey wrote:
> Unless you want to join the bloated generation (galeon or konqueror),
> mozilla/phoenix is your best option.  galeon is excellent (invokes
> the mozilla engine), but I've decided to avoid the gnome library
> overheads by using the real thing.  There is also skipstone (invokes
> the mozilla engine), and I had quite good results with this one.
>
> Except for konqueror (kde wrote their own engine) and dillo (almost a
> browser), all the other graphical browsers that I'm aware of use the
> mozilla(gecko) engine.

A couple of observations/corrections here. Dillo does use the gecko 
engine, but it's an old version. This is probably in part because dillo 
seems to have been abandoned by the author. A few months ago, I saw a 
note at the head of  the site from the server's sysadmin asking if 
anyone could contact the author. Go figure.

As far a konqueror bieng bloated, I find it hard to believe you would 
call konqeror bloated in comparison to mozilla. Phoenix or Skipstone, 
perhaps. Galeon, or Opera, I dunno - I've never tried the latter, and 
the former looked so ugly I couldn't bear it.

Here's a quick comparison between fresh konqeror and phoenix sessions.

%CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS COMMAND
0.4  7.7 58984 19924 kdeinit: konqueror --silent
4.0  7.8 33340 20112 /usr/lib/phoenix/phoenix-bin

Bloat, eh?

Konqueror isn't perfect - KHTML isn't as good as Gecko. Occasionally I 
find a site that breaks with Konqueror, so I break out phoenix. Then 
again, konqueror doubles as a local file browser - and a very good one. 

Before I started using KDE I used skipstone, and I can heartily 
recommend it as the best Gecko browser out there.

One final (slightly OT) story. One night I was sitting in a hotel room 
in LA with a bunch of fellow students. Naturally, I had a calling card 
and an acoustic coupler: I dialed up my computer at home, checked my 
email (as one would). I had just started using Gentoo on my laptop, and 
the only usable net app I had was mutt. At some point, the conversation 
drifts onto the subject of the Hubble telescope, and someone asked if 
we could browse the hubble site. This was crazy! I had procured a 
connection, at considerable effort, but I had no browser.

Ping times were in the thousands. Throughput was around 1kb/s. Phoenix 
was several megabytes. I didn't even consider mozilla. Then I looked up 
dillo: 327kb! I began the emerge, and my valiant modem blazed through 
with a time of just over 2 1/2 minutes. Compiling was another 5 minutes 
on my Pentium 200, but sure enough, it worked.

So you see, dillo does have it's uses.

-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <kode187@kode187.net>


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