[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting Sunday + a bit more

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     Besides Palemoon you can try Qupzilla.

Bobbie, have you been trying Qupzilla?  I'm curious, and would value
your opinion.

I've probably mentioned before that I maintain a complete list of known
Web browsers for Linux at
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/kicking.html#linuxbrowser , and that
includes ultra-brief characterisations of most of them, usually just a
word or two.  _But_ that's generally gleaned from online descriptions 
rather than personal experience.

The lightweight browsers (Qupzilla, Dillo, Xombrero, Uzbl, Luakit,
surf+tabbed, qutebrowser, Vimprobable, lariza, Arora, Midori, NetSurf,
Liri Browser, links in graphical mode) are all delightfully fast &
small, but necessarily shy of features.  Palemoon, by contrast, is rare
in being a Mozilla-family browser (uses a local fork of Mozilla's Gecko
rendering engine) that is full-featured and intends to retain the XUL,
XPCOM, and NPAPI plugin support code that Firefox is discarding with the
effect of deactivating most Firefox extensions and all Firefox theming.

It's possible that Mozilla.org will recover eventually from the
massive disruption with the current transition to WebExtensions.
Certainly, Firefox's upcoming ability to support real sandboxing and
each tab being a separate process will have advantages (at real cost in
RAM suckage), and maybe WebExtensions' inability to support any kind of
theming will eventually get solved.  In the medium term, what I'm seeing 
is a lot of people saying 'Actually, I like my XUL/XPCOM extensions' 
wanting to move sideway -- and not to light Web browsers that, for all
their advantages in speed/size, can't do that.