By Andrew Min
I have this huge love/hate relationship with Firefox. It’s way too bloated and so much slower compared to the other browsers I’ve tried. But I can’t live without it, simply because I never found a decent alternative. I can’t use Internet Explorer or Safari simply because I run Linux. Besides, neither seemed extremely stellar to me. Konqueror won’t render everything. Sure, that’s the programmer’s fault and Konqueror is W3C compliant and all that, but that doesn’t help me read that site. Ditto for Opera. I also don’t need an email, BitTorrent, and feed client. All I need is a web browser. And Epiphany and Dillo are great, but I don’t like running Gnome apps in my KDE install. That’s why I was quite excited when I found Arora, a WebKit-powered Qt web browser.
What is Arora?
Originally, Arora was created to test out the WebKit library in Qt 4.4. In layman’s terms, WebKit is an engine that displays web pages and Qt is a library that displays programs. But then, the project leaders decided to fork it into a browser that would one day be able to stand proudly next to Firefox and the other champions of the open source web browsing world. Currently, it’s still in heavy development (there are no stable or even alpha versions), but it’s remarkable mature for its age.
So why would anyone ever use it over Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, or any of the other popular web browsers out there? Well, Arora is extremely lightweight, weighing in at under a megabyte. It’s also lightning fast (WebKit is one of the fastest browsing engines around), uses less than 10,000 lines of code, and works on all the platforms that Qt is supported on (Windows, OS X, and Linux).
Installation
Installing Arora is easy on Windows or Debian-based systems like Ubuntu. There’s a handy Windows installer and a .deb package for both. Ubuntu users will also need to turn on the hardy-backports repository while Debian users will need the testing repository. Macintosh users and non-Debian users aren’t so lucky: you’ll have to compile it from source. Luckily, there’s a very useful wiki page, Beginner Step By Step Instructions, on this topic.
Arora: A great web browser, though a little buggy
After installing Arora, I opened it up and was pleasantly surprised. All the browsers I’d ever run, with the exception of Konqueror, looked horrible in KDE. But Arora looked great. It was clean, simple, and looked terrific. I was so impressed by the look that I decided to see if it would look as good in non-KDE environments. I wasn’t disappointed. Arora adopted the theme and icons of both Gnome and Windows XP with style.
Being a true geek, the first place I went was the Preferences pane (Edit>Preferences). All the standard options (homepage, fonts and stylesheets, JavaScript, cookies, proxies, and so on) were there. Since most of the defaults were fine, I closed out and went back to the main browser. I was impressed by the amazing speed. I didn’t benchmark it, but it seemed to me to be the fastest browser I’d ever seen, even more than the often touted Firefox 3.0. Gmail, Digg, Newsvine, and Facebook all loaded twice as fast as they did in Firefox.
Speed is, of course, not the only factor in choosing a web browser. I was curious to see how well it would perform handling rich AJAX apps, so I headed over to Google Docs. Everything worked flawlessly. Well, maybe not flawlessly. Gmail had a few problems when logging in. I had to tell it to not remember me in order for it to work, which is kind of a problem. Also, Flash (and other Netscape plugins) aren’t available until Qt 4.5. Since Qt 4.4 was just released and each 4.x release has taken between seven to twelve months, Arora users won’t get Flash for quite a while.
Stability is also a little bit of an issue for Arora. It’s very easy to crash the browser, especially if you’re using rich Web 2.0 apps. Also, opening multiple items at the same time, opening one page while loading another, or trying to type in a textbox while a page is loading is a very bad idea. Of course, this is simply a stability issue that will be resolved down the road.
There’s one other minor problem: a huge lack of a password manager. Most browsers have some sort of password manager, ranging from Firefox’s built-in one to Konqueror’s KWallet integration. However, Arora has nothing. That can get quite annoying, since you’ll always have to type in your password rather than having it automatically filled.
Luckily, these little quirks aren’t such a big problem for me. Why? Chances are, they’ll get fixed. The project lead, icefox, and the members, zander32, Jason Donenfeld, inetperson, and ariya.hidaya, are extremely active. You can expect your bug report to be answered within forty-eight hours and you’ll find that many of the feature requests you send in will actually make it into the project code. Out of the three feature requests I’ve submitted so far, one has been fixed, one has been started, and one won’t be fixed because it’s not technically feasible.
Conclusion
Right now, I’m still using Firefox. I can’t live without Flash and those usability bugs are too much for me. But this is one web browser I’ll be definitely keeping my eye on. I recommend that you do too. Because one day, I can actually see myself uninstalling Firefox and using Arora instead. And I never thought I’d see that day.
Rating: None (pre-alpha)
2 comments ↓
Hey there! I am very interested in the segfaults that you found. I have worked very hard on keeping Arora segfault free and fixing any that I hear about because I know first hand that applications that segfault are simply not used. Can you provide some more detail about which sites were causing the crashes and how to reproduce them?
As for the password manager, I myself miss it and it will be added. So much todo it just has a lower priority then other things. Just curious, which was the task that was started?
Actually, later git versions have much improved the stability.
Good to hear about the password manager. I’ll be following that.
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