Lightweight browsers Part I: Midori and Qupzilla

Debian comes with iceweasel (ie repackaged Firefox) by default. It is stable and run well, plus with some tweaking of the config you can get some improved performance. However it does consumes CPU cycles since it is a heavy browser. These next two post I will be presenting four lightweight browsers that you can to supplement your web browsing.

Midori

As its web site suggest midori is "a lightweight, fast, and free web browser". It renders pages fairly well even heavy graphic pages. It does have some nice features like colored tabs and ability to use greasemonkey scripts. However it does have its issues. Downloading files can be at times buggy, however uploading files works fine. Sometimes it renders pages as a mobile site. Also it logs you out of gmail if it is idle for a long period of time. The midori web sites explains some of these issues in their faq. Personally I do like using it due to the speed but it does annoy me when pages like Ubuntu Forums comes up as a mobile site. Here are some screenshots:

Qupzilla

Qupzilla is a lightweight qt based web browser. Like midori it renders pages pretty fast. It has password manager that defaults to holding your passwords in plain text but you can change it to hold them in an encrypted database (I do not know why encrypted is not on by default). It has no issues rendering pages, however uploads and downloads at times either fails or crashes. I usually use wget to download so this is not an issue for me. The stability in page rendering make qupzilla my default browser besides iceweasel. Here is a screenshot :

Midori is available in the stable repository and Qupzilla is available in Jessie repository.