lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Julien Lavergne <gilir@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Many people complained about the choice of Firefox on Lubuntu. It's time
to discuss it, to see if it's useful to change for another one. I can
see 3 possibles choices :

== Keep Firefox ==
+ Firefox is well-known
+ Well maintained upstream and on Ubuntu
+ Many features
- Slow on startup
- Memory usage
? Rendering seems slower

== Switch to Midori ==
+ Small and fast
+ Memory usage
- Upstream active but with limited developers compared to the 2 others.
- Features limited

== Switch to Chromium ==
+ Similar to Chrome, which begin to be well-known
+ Good interface for small screen
+ Upstream active, supported by Google
+- Firefox have still more possibility and features than Chromium
? Maybe be maintained by Mobile Team
? Private data send ?


This is a quick benchmark I made, to have a quick view of performance
for those 3 browsers. 

Startup : time to startup
Memory 1 : Memory with google.com, wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu and gmail.com
connected.
Memory 2 : Same that 1 + 5 ubuntu.com pages
Memory 3 : Closing all the pages except google.com

. 	.	Firefox	.	 Midori	.	Chromium
Startup 	3.4s 		1.8s 		1.5s

Memory using Xfce task manager

.	.	Firefox .	Midori .	Chromium
Memory 1	70Mo		33Mo		28Mo
Memory 2	83Mo		78Mo		33Mo
Memory 3	58Mo		45Mo		32Mo

Memory using about:memory of Chromium

. 	.	Firefox	. 	Midori .	Chromium
Memory 1	70Mo		21Mo		18Mo
Memory 2	91Mo		72Mo		18Mo
Memory 3	50Mo		38Mo		18Mo


== Others choice ==
* Opera: Closed source.
* Aurora: I can't see any advantage over Midori, with QT depends.
* Epiphany: Too much GNOME depends.

For now, I'm more for the Chromium option. Midori is nice, but I don't
think we will have enough time to test and maintain it correctly.

I'm interesting to have user experience with those browser on low
ressources computers. If you are running Lucid, you can install them
from official repository, and play with them :)

Regards,
Juline Lavergne