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Old 13th January 2009
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Default Need a lightweight browser to replace Fx3

uname -a: FreeBSD dixie.launchmodem.com 7.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE #1: Mon Jan 5 00:42:11 UTC 2009 root@dixie.launchmodem.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/VIPER i386

Problem:

Firefox 3.0.3 (TabMix Plus / SpeedDial add-ons installed) tends to consume huge amounts of CPU resources and memory whenever I have many tabs open, or combine it with plugins.

Since I often idle at 3 or 4 tabs open, and surf with anything between 2~70 tabs open -- this is a problem. Any prolonged usage of Flash7 is killing the CPU monitor, actually having a lot of tabs open is ridicules, and over time even the MPlayer plugin gives things a royal screw. Over the past 3 days, I've seen temperatures as high as 74 C reported via the hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature sysctl. Right now, I'm at 68C and rising (from 58C) with only this tab and a stream open in the MPlayer plugin - and CPU spiking from normal levesl all the way up to 90~100% periodically. Since the upgrade from 512MB -> 1024MB RAM, updating FreeBSD (and pkgs), and changing form a wooden chess board to a plastic lapdesk; the heat level has gotten much worse then it ever has been before. Previously, Firefox 3 tended to spike CPU and memory usage from here to Timbuktu like this just as badly, but heat was usually under control. Right now, it's just Flash/MPlayer plugins and having more then a couple tabs open that is killing heat....

Therefore, /usr/local/lib/firefox3/firefox-bin will soon have a evil date with a hex editor before being removed. This has become a ludicrous is situation for browsing the web


]Requirement:

I need to find a light weight (compared to Netscape/Mozilla spawn) web browser to use as my primary $BROWSER. I've begun more thorough testing, but have not found anything usable yet in ports.


I need something supporting (in order of priority):
  • http://, https://, ftp://, file:// support
  • Tabbed browsing, the ability to drag/drop the tabs would also be a great plus
  • The ability to manipulate the user agent string (without recompiling would be nice, but I don't mind that)
  • JavaScript support - sufficient for using GMail for hours each day
  • Support for passing on multimedia objects to external applications (without a big fuss; although code editing / recompilation is not a problem)
  • Support for common HTML/CSS including tables and frames; i.e. must render most pages in a usable manor.
  • Support for displaying JPEG/PNG/GIF/SVG images inline, or easy (i.e. one click) passing them onto an external application
  • STABILITY -- the web browser should NEVER under any circumstances crash or become "unusable"
  • Support for Cookies


When it comes to GTK/Qt dependencies, Gnome/KDE/Xfce, or programming language used: I honestly don't give a darn - unless it means installing another GCC build or half of GNUStep from ports. Start up time is really not an issue, only resource usage. Custom scripts / styles being loaded per website would be cool too. I need something that I can surf the web unhindered in on BSD. and still be able to handle multi-media content -- without burning my laptop up lol.



Does anyone have any suggestions?
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Last edited by TerryP; 13th January 2009 at 06:19 AM.
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