What is the best internet browser experience ?

I was hoping openelecs download tool had a decent browser but its very poor. I could not even get to login to one of my favourites.


Just wondered what o/s and browser people had tested ?

I know Flash is not working and pages may be slow but want to try and use it if I can as takes about 30 secs to boot !



The o/s needs a gui front end for ease of use.

I already have a decent media centre and really want to use th pi for some browsing .

I was hoping openelecs download tool had a decent browser but its very poor. I could not even get to login to one of my favourites.


Just wondered what o/s and browser people had tested ?

I know Flash is not working and pages may be slow but want to try and use it if I can as takes about 30 secs to boot !



The o/s needs a gui front end for ease of use.

I already have a decent media centre and really want to use th pi for some browsing .

try midori if you don't have it already. that kind of sucks sometimes, though, so you could try the terminal-based lynx browser. It only loads text (w/ links and entry fields, thankfully), but it's always fast.

[dom]

Use Chromium on Debian Squeeze.
Use Midori on Debian Wheezy.

I'm using Midori on Raspbian and it's very acceptable. I changed browser settings to identify as iPhone so some pages displays mobile version which is much more lightweight (also it's not necessary). It supports tabs (with closing undo), userstyles (very handy for browsing this forum) and remembers sessions even after crash. The only option it doesn't have is disabling animations.

Any news of Chrome OS ?

ghans

I currently have my pi set up with Arch linux and midori and I consider it usable. before I had Debian squeeze and google chrome and it was borderline, I think the dns prefetching was thrashing the cpu. I used midori and debian first and that was abysmal.

With a good connection (40Mb/s in my case) web pages seem to take ~10 seconds on average from enter being pressed to the page being usable. keep in mind most of that is the cpu being pegged and working to render the page. If you already know how to use Arch I'd recommend the Arch/midori combo, if you don't know Arch either find a free weekend to learn or go elsewhere.

Also I haven't tried any other browsers in Arch yet since I think midori is the only one they have on the official repositories so far. when I dive into the AUR I'll probably mess with some others.

For the best browsing experience, use a machine that is more powerful. Seriously, the Pi is a lousy machine for web browsing.

It's Arch and Midori on my Pi, though most sites cause the machine to freeze up for a minute or more, as the machine chews its way through the rendering (probably due to the low RAM). If there were a chance to upgrade the Pi's memory (even to 512MB), I'd jump at it, though I know it's not an option - maybe a possibility for Pi v2?

On a related note, an appeal to the site administrators: would it be possible to make the home/landing page "lighter", for those visitors foolhardy enough to be browsing in with a RasPi? With all the blog posts - often with photos, embedded YouTube videos, etc. - the poor old Pi usually chokes on its own Web site... oh, the irony

On a side note, is anyone else having issues with Chromium on Squeeze? Twice now whilst browsing it has completely locked up the Pi to the point where I have left it 5/10minutes but in the end had to pull the power?

For the best browsing experience, use a machine that is more powerful. Seriously, the Pi is a lousy machine for web browsing.

That is true. Today's web pages are not designed to work fine on such a small device as Rpi. Even using some older computers/laptops (which are couple times faster than Rpi) you won't get good experience.
That being said, it's sometimes usefull to use web directly on Rpi, for example to easly copy/paste some examples from the web.

On a related note, an appeal to the site administrators: would it be possible to make the home/landing page "lighter", for those visitors foolhardy enough to be browsing in with a RasPi? With all the blog posts - often with photos, embedded YouTube videos, etc. - the poor old Pi usually chokes on its own Web site... oh, the irony ;)

Try setting your midori to identify as iPhone. It will help in many sites, including main raspberrypi site which has special, trimmed look for phone browsers.

On lower powered netbooks I tend to use Arora:

http://code.google.com/p/arora/

Haven't got my Pi yet so I can't comment on the speed on the Pi...it's incredibly lightweight and fast on Debian on my naff old netbook...

It's not perfect though, it can be a bit glitchy at times...its WebKit based though, so you shouldn't have any problems with most content.

I'd be inclined to just try out Chrome as well...that is surprisingly good on low powered machines...

Cheers

PG

Also, you might want to try the mobile version of sites, url usually starts with m. instead of www. Spartan layout, but that cuts both ways.

On Arch Linux, I've been using dwb. It's as minimalistic as they come, yet a WebKit browser.

The only alternative I consider (GUI) is dillo. Otherwise, I'll just use lynx or elinks. Haven't tried links with the -g flag, though. May be another good alternative.

With midori on my overclocked pi (1ghz) with a fast sd card (sandisk extreme 45 mbps) the internet browsing experience is far better then I thought it would be.
That said, I will be switching to chromium as soon as it will be available on wheezy. Partially for html5.

I dont see what Debian users are complaining about with regards to web browsing. Im using Wheezy with Midori and although it's as slow as I'd expect, it is far from being unusable as some users have reported. ive browsed a number of websites with minimal hassle, Google, RPi Forums, Wikipedia, 4chan and they all seem to work just fine.

I am using a standard ArchArm install with no tuning.Run Window Maker,Netsurf,Leafpad and spacefm.all of them run reasonably well.Surfing is good on some sites and not so good on others.
Window Maker is fast and neat.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Ice Weasel (a.k.a. Firefox), the Wheezy repos have v10 and the performance is grand under the latest Raspbian. Even HTML5 Youtube videos play (badly).

Lots of recomendations for Midori, but I struggle to class this as usable when it doesn't download files.

Combine this with NetSurf, which can't use Javascript, and then try downloading the Oracle JDK. :-/