How to run Epiphany (Web) Browser in Windows 10 with WSL

Epiphany (Web) is a lightweight Linux-only web browser based on the modern WebKit engine, and it is the default web browser in GNOME desktop environment. However, now you can run it natively in Windows 10, thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and the Xming X server for Windows.

Here is how to install Epiphany 3.12 in Windows 10:

1. Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and reboot the computer
2. Install Xming X server for Windows
3. Open Windows Command Prompt and run: bash
4. Run these commands in bash:
   sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser gnome-keyring gnome-themes-standard
   sudo sed -i 's/<listen>.*<\/listen>/<listen>tcp:host=localhost,port=0<\/listen>/' /etc/dbus-1/session.conf
   sudo sed -i 's/Ambiance/Adwaita/' /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
5. Right-click on your desktop and create a new shortcut for the following item:
   bash -c "DISPLAY=:0 NO_AT_BRIDGE=1 epiphany-browser"
   with the following icon (click it to download the ico file):
   
6. Check if Xming is running in the system tray and double-click the newly created shortcut. Epiphany window should appear:

Epiphany (Web) browser 3.12 on Windows 10 is using WebKitGTK+ 2.4, which scores 318 points in HTML5 Test.

UPDATE: By upgrading the WSL from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04, you can have the latest Epiphany 3.20 using WebKitGTK+ 2.14 on Windows 10, which scores 386 points in HTML5 Test:

K-Meleon vs QupZilla vs Otter Browser vs Midori - comparison of lightweight web browsers

Apart from the most popular web browsers for Windows - Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, IE and Edge - there are also more lightweight open source web browsers, which deserve more recognition. This time I am testing the latest versions of four of them: K-Meleon 76.0 beta 3 (based on Gecko), Otter Browser 0.9.10 (based both on QtWebKit and on QtWebEngine), QupZilla 1.8.9 (based on QtWebKit) and Midori 0.5.11 (based on WebKitGTK+), on a PC with Windows 8 and 2 GB RAM. In the comparison test I am focusing on HTML5 features, performance and RAM usage at startup and after loading four big websites in tabs.

Here are the results:

	K-Meleon	Otter QtWebKit	Otter QtWebEngine	QupZilla	Midori
HTML5 Test	467 pts	399 pts	525 pts	400 pts	341 pts
Octane Benchmark	5915 pts	1222 pts	6653 pts	1285 pts	806 pts
BrowserMark	1590 pts	1165 pts	1926 pts	1052 pts	149 pts
RAM at startup	35 MB	12 MB	54 MB	40 MB	40 MB
RAM at 4 tabs	151 MB	335 MB	236 MB	395 MB	271 MB

The best alternative web browser is Otter Browser with QtWebEngine (based on Chromium), made by a Polish developer Emdek. This is the only multi-process web browser out of them and has a really good performance. The second place goes to K-Meleon. That said, QtWebEngine is still in the works, so it may be buggy, and it uses more memory than Gecko engine used in K-Meleon.

Phoenix OS - Android for x86 Desktop PC with Stardust Browser

While everybody is talking about Remix OS, there is another free Chinese Android distribution for a desktop PC based on Android-x86 called Phoenix OS. It is still in the beta stage, although it should run on most of 64-bit x86-compatible machines. Just write the downloaded ZIP file to a USB drive using USBMaker and boot a PC from it. There is also an ARM version of Phoenix OS and a 32-bit version should be available soon.

Phoenix OS is based on Android Lollipop 5.1.1 and Linux kernel 4.0.9 with support for OpenGL ES 3.0. It runs Android packages (APK) and it has a few of them pre-installed, like Stardust Browser based on Chromium 45 and WPS Office. The rest you can download from Google Play Store, F-Droid, Mobogenie or Aptoide.

Here are some screenshots from Phoenix OS 1.0 Beta:

Desktop

Settings

Main Menu 

Stardust Browser scores 495 points in HTML5 Test

Stardust Browser scores 18035 points in Octane Benchmark

My Computer

Notifications Center

WPS Office

Terminal Emulator

Keep in mind that Phoenix OS is made in China, so be careful with providing your sensitive data. The support forum is in Chinese, but there is a dedicated subreddit in English.

Download Phoenix OS 1.0 beta from EU server

Run desktop apps, WebKit and Chromium web browser on Firefox OS!

Firefox OS is a fully open source mobile platform, but it lacks many full-featured apps. Starting from today, RollApp provides full desktop apps for Firefox OS, including LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, Tomboy, KeePassX and File Roller. The apps are loaded on RollApp cloud servers and are streamed using WebSockets, which make them run smoothly.

You can even run the Web browser, powered by WebKit, which you can start by typing any URL in Tomboy and clicking on it.

The Web browser is really fast, it gets 6568 points in the Octane benchmark.

UPDATE: Now you can run Chromium web browser in Firefox OS! It scores 9677 points in the Octane benchmark.

All RollApp apps can be found in the Firefox Marketplace.

Google Chrome Data Saver extension leaked

Google Chrome for iOS and Android have been using Data Compression Proxy for a while. This feature has been brought to desktop thanks to the open source Data Compression Proxy extension by niu tech. Now Google is developing its own extension entitled Data Saver (codenamed Flywheel Desktop), screenshot of which has recently leaked:

UPDATE: The official extension is now available in Chrome Web Store.

You can also compare Chrome Compression Proxy with Opera Turbo and Mozilla Janus.

Source: crbug.com

Chrome Data Compression Proxy vs Mozilla Janus vs Opera Turbo

Most of web browser vendors provide a way to speed up browsing by using compression proxy. Opera has long been known for its Turbo/Off-road mode, Google Chrome has the Data Compression Proxy and Mozilla has recently introduced the Janus Proxy, which you can access system-wide using a PAC file at http://janus.allizom.org.

I have tested onload event times of various web pages using all three compression proxies and a direct 5 Mb/s connection over WiFi on my PC. Total times as well as Numion YourSpeed results are shown below:

	Chrome DCP	Mozilla Janus	Opera Turbo	Direct
ZDNet	11.5 s	24.5 s	11.4 s	11.1 s
CNN	14.3 s	20.0 s	12.2 s	10.7 s
BBC	7.3 s	27.3 s	11.7 s	6.6 s
NYtimes	6.5 s	10.7 s	6.1 s	5.6 s
eBay	8.7 s	14.5 s	7.8 s	8.1 s
Amazon	5.3 s	10.6 s	3 s	5 s
Pinterest	7.4 s	12 s	9.2 s	7.3 s
Wikipedia	3.8 s	6.3 s	3 s	3 s
Total	64.8 s	125.9 s	64.4 s	57.4 s
Numion YourSpeed	218 kb/s	119 kb/s	216 kb/s	308 kb/s

Surprisingly, the fastest is a direct Internet connection, but this would depend on your local bandwidth. Opera Turbo and Chrome Compression Proxy go head to head, both using WebP image format. The slowest is Janus, using MozJPEG instead.

Opera 21 features Off-Road mode version 2 with video compression

Opera 21.0.1419.0 web browser for Mac and Windows, based on Chromium 34.0.1825.4, has just been released. This Developer release provides many new features: Aura, a hardware-accelerated window manager, an option to show full URL in address bar, full keyboard support for web apps, and so on.

But the most exciting experimental features are hidden under opera://flags page, namely:

• Off-Road mode, version 2 - a.k.a. Opera Turbo 2, which uses next-generation servers and protocols such as WebP and SPDY for faster web browsing.
• Video compression in Off-Road mode - which optimizes video in version 2 of Off-Road mode, using Skyfire Rocket Optimizer aquired by Opera.
• Speed Dial extensions compositing - which enables hardware accelerated compositing for Speed Dial extensions.
• Enable lazy session loading - which loads only the active tab when restoring browser session. Remaining tabs will be loaded when activated.
• Extended lazy session loading - which changes mode of operation of lazy session loading so that all tabs are gradually loaded in the background.
• Synchronization - a.k.a. Opera Link.
• Tab hibernation - which tells idle background tabs to hibernate.
• DirectWrite - which enables smooth font rendering (finally!).
• Experimental QUIC protocol - which speeds up web browsing on supported servers.
• HTTPS over experimental QUIC protocol - which enables QUIC for HTTPS.
• SPDY/4 alpha 2 - which is more up-to-date than SPDY/3.
• HTTP/2 draft 04 - which is a next-generation protocol based on SPDY.
• Built-in Asynchronous DNS - which is an internal non-blocking DNS client.
• Enable Experimental JavaScript - a.k.a. ECMAScript Harmony features, such as proxies, weak maps, sets, maps, typeof semantics and block scoping.
• Enable experimental Web Platform features - such as CSS Shapes, Canvas Blend modes, Canvas Paths and CSS Clip Paths.

As to performance, Off-Road mode version 2 is faster than version 1. The average measured speed in Numion YourSpeed was 375 kbps vs 301 kbps on a slow network. The video compression works by serving files with content type video/skyfire or video/mp4 from Opera Mini servers.

Download Opera Developer

Speed up your Google Chrome for desktop by using Data Compression Proxy

Google has added a Chrome Data Compression Proxy to its mobile Google Chrome browser for iOS and Android. Like Opera Turbo, it speeds up web browsing by greatly reducing size of transferred HTTP packets, by using a SPDY protocol, compressing resources, optimizing images to WEBP format and tunneling all traffic via secure HTTPS connection. Unfortunately, it has been available only to mobile users. Until now.

Browsing the net, I have just found an experimental Google Chrome extension, which brings Data Compression Proxy to desktop. This is an unofficial add-on, so it could potentially break some web pages or stop working some day, but for now it works great and accelerates web browsing significantly. What is more, it is open source, so anybody can check its source and contribute to it.

UPDATE: Google has released the official Data Saver extension for Chrome.

Download Data Saver from Chrome Web Store

Liebao (Cheetah) Browser

A Chinese company KingSoft (known best for its free Microsoft Office alternative) has released a good looking web browser Liebao (Cheetah in Chinese). The latest version is 4.3 and it is based on Chromium 29 and Blink engine, with compatibility mode based on Trident engine from IE. Cheetah Browser runs in Chinese by default, but deleting the file: C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Liebao\x.x.x.x\Locales\zh-CN.pak enables English language. The browser chrome was designed by Rigo, a partner of Lenovo and Microsoft.

Have a look at the promo video:

Here is the screenshot of themes gallery:

The new tab page:

The main menu with tools:

Cheetah Browser scores 494 points in HTML5 Test. You can download this browser directly from here (exe file, open at your own risk).

The best Android browser is... Opera!

I have tested the most popular web browsers on Android Jelly Bean: Stock Android Browser, Google Chrome 29, Opera 16, Opera Mobile Classic 12.1, Mozilla Firefox 24 and Dolphin Browser 10 with Jetpack. While Opera and Opera Classic have an Off-road or Turbo mode, which speeds up loading websites, it was disabled for this test. Here is the comparison table, two best results are green:

Browser	Browsermark	Octane Benchmark	HTML5 Test	CSS3 Test
Stock Browser	2132	1175	327 + 14	45
Chrome	2240	1951	429 + 11	60
Opera	2650	2089	443 + 11	62
Opera Classic	1740	571	406 + 12	52
Firefox	2071	2253	426 + 10	58
Dolphin	2008	1544	471 + 3	57

The best Android web browser, in terms of performance and compliance to web standards, is the new Opera! However, Dolphin has the best support for HTML5 and Chrome with Firefox are almost as fast as Opera.

Safari in iOS 7 has better performance than iOS 6

As the new Apple iOS 7 has been finally released, I have upgraded an iPad 2 and compared the performance of Safari Mobile browser in iOS 7 to iOS 6. The benchmark results show that iOS 7 has better performance in web browsing and better compliance to web standards. Have a look at the comparison table:

Browser	Browsermark	Octane Benchmark	HTML5 Test	CSS3 Test
Safari / iOS7	2288	1479	399 + 9	61%
Safari / iOS6	2022	935	386 + 9	59%
Improvement	13%	58%	3%	2%

For more information about Safari Mobile in iOS 7, read this excellent article on Breaking the Mobile Web.

How to update Safari for Windows to the latest version of WebKit

If you are still using Safari 5.1 for Windows (e.g. for the excellent font smoothing), you can keep up with modern web browsers by upgrading its WebKit engine to the latest version released by Apple. Just follow these steps:

1. If you have iTunes already installed, go to step 5.
2. Download the latest release of iTunes for Windows.
3. Open the downloaded file iTunesSetup.exe in an archive manager, like 7-Zip or WinRAR.
4. Extract the file AppleApplicationSupport.msi and run it. Complete the installation.
5. Copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support (or without (x86) when on 32-bit system) to C:\Program Files (x86)\Safari and merge with the existing Apple Application Support folder.

When you restart Safari, you will notice much better HTML5 & CSS3 support (319 -> 342 points in HTML5 Test) and JavaScript performance. Enjoy!

Alternatives to Google Instant Previews

A few days ago Google silently disabled Instant Previews in Google Search. It provided small thumbnails of search results, which you could quickly preview before loading the full web page. Here is a list of alternative extensions for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera web browser:

• SearchPreview for Firefox and Chrome
• CoolPreviews for Firefox and Chrome
• ezLinkPreview for Chrome
• Thumbshots for Firefox
• SearchenginePreview for Opera

What is your favorite one?

Baidu Browser featuring T5 Engine is a king of HTML5

Chinese company Baidu has launched a new web browser for Android, called Baidu Browser (or Explorer). It claims to be 20% faster than others thanks to the new T5 Engine. I didn't believe it, so I downloaded and tested it on my Android 2.3.

The home page is clean, but in Chinese. The default search engine is of course Baidu. There is a voice search as well. The user agent contains FlyFlow/2.2, which is a codename of Baidu Browser.

T5 Engine is indeed a king of HTML5, it scores 467 points and 8 bonus points out of 500 in the HTML5 Test - far more than current mobile and desktop browsers!

As to performance of Baidu Browser (right), it's beats Dolphin Browser (left) in BrowserMark by 19950 to 22322 points, which is 11%!

As you can see, Chinese can develop very good and standard-complaint browsers! Download Baidu Browser for Android 2.2+ or Windows Phone 7+.