With Linux you get a few options in web browsers. In this article we highlight 11 of those browsers - some popular, some not so popular. Whether you want to use a big name browser or not, this article will give you an insight into what your choices are.
What Types Of Web Browsers Are There
In linux we have two main groups of browsers: Text based and GUI based. The web browsers can have different engines behind them (an engine is what makes the browser work). The two biggest engines used are Gecko and Webkit, but below is a full list of all engines that are commonly used.
- Gecko
- WebKit
- Presto and Presto Core 2
- Trident
- Tasman
- KHTML
This is probably not all of them, but it's just to give you an idea. Web Browsers are a critical part of any operation system. These days most people wouldn't know what to do without Internet and their web browser.
Below, you will find an overview of 11 web browsers. I used my own blog to test them. I did this because I know exactly what the website has in terms of Flash, Javascript, and advertising.
Each browser is rated on the following:
- Usability
- Adblocker
- Javascript & Flash
Please note that I have used all of them to do my regular surfing (blogs, news, Google etc.) for at least a couple of hours except for the text based one. I just couldn't bring myself to use the text-based web browser for more then a few minutes.
The list below is in no particular order.
| The Lynx Web Browser | Rating  |
This is the text-based web browser I checked out. Lynx is one of the web browsers that you would use if you only have a Terminal like on a Server with out an X-server installed.
It is a fully functional browser, and you can do basic stuff like open pages and click download links. Of course, it goes without question that this browser doesn't have Flash or Javascript. There is no use for Flash or Java if the browser is text-based, after all.
I can only rate this browser as average because I rated the browser on the above criteria. But, for what it does, it's great and it has helped me out of a squeeze before in a server environment.
| The Arora Browser | Rating  |
Arora is a fully functional simple cross-platform web browser. Javascript seems to work without a problem. Flash, however, doesn't. Arora uses the QTWebKit which means there is no problem running it on the QT-based KDE desktops.
The feature list is very short: History and Bookmarks. Arora is a very basic browser which seems to have a problem with SSL. I tried to login to Ebay. This didn't work (see screenshot below).
I could only rate this web browser as good because of the fact that I use Ebay a lot and I need to be able to login to Ebay. Of course the lack of flash didn't help. The browser seems pretty fast and I like the fact that the address bar turns into a progress bar when loading pages. I'll come back to this browser when they are a little further in the development. If SSL is usable, then the browser will get an higher rating.
| The Dillo Web Browser | Rating |
Dillo is one of the basic web browsers. Dillo is small - just over 400k. At this size (as you can see on the screenshot), it doesn't do any CSS processing. There is no Flash support and, as far is I can tell, no Java either.
It does login to my Ebay account, but the My Ebay page is pretty much unreadable.
If the developers would include CSS processing, then this would be a great browser. Dillo claims to load websites fast but, c'mon, this really isn't hard to do if you don't load Javascript or CSS.
No need to explain why this one was rated so low.