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.

Ziproxy vs Janus vs PageSpeed Module - comparison of compression proxies

Only 27% of the global population has access to a fast internet (over 10 Mbps) and hundreds of millions of people around the world have a limited Internet connection. This is where a data compression proxy (a.k.a. web accelerator) comes to the rescue. It optimizes loading of web pages by minimizing HTML/CSS/JS, enabling gzip compression, re-encoding images, etc.

Some time ago I was comparing proxies in the cloud: Mozilla Janus, Opera Turbo and Google Compression Proxy. Now I am testing open source HTTP forwarding proxies: Ziproxy, Mozilla Janus and Google PageSpeed Module (mod_pagespeed) for Apache with mod_proxy, all installed on my premise. This time the primary factor is not loading time, but total size of various web pages.

	Ziproxy	Janus	PageSpeed	Direct
ZDNet	1026 KB	1117 KB	802 KB	1225 KB
TheNextWeb	3768 KB	3638 KB	3672 KB	4156 KB
New Yorker	4528 KB	4872 KB	4782 KB	5357 KB
AntyWeb	1258 KB	2750 KB	1928 KB	3493 KB
iStockPhoto	2905 KB	3699 KB	3444 KB	3756 KB
Total	13485 KB (25% saved)	16076 KB (11% saved)	14628 KB (19% saved)	17987 KB

The best compressing HTTP proxy is Ziproxy with 25% of data savings. The second place goes to Google PageSpeed with 19%. Mozilla Janus was the worst with only 11% saved.

All the proxies were tested with equal image quality settings (60%).

Slack is so slow! Here are 5 lightweight open source alternatives

Slack is a popular communication soft bloatware for teams. It allows you to chat with other users, groups and in channels (rooms), like good old IRC. However, the main issue with Slack is that is it way too bloated and loads too slowly. It takes 105 requests, 18 MB of data and 30 seconds to load!

So if you are concerned about your data plan, performance, or security of your business correspondence stored on third party servers, you should consider one of the lightweight open source web alternatives for Slack:

Let's Chat - loads in ~5 seconds:

JabbR - loads in ~8 seconds:

Candy - loads in ~5 seconds:

Echoplexus - loads in ~6 seconds:

Shout - finally a web IRC client, loads in ~5 seconds:

Each of them is open source, so you can install it for free on your private server and keep your internal business communication secure.

UPDATE: There is a new project called Mattermost - check it out!

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