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Topic: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser (Read 3235 times)

Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

According to this test, Otter Browser with QtWebEngine beats QupZilla and K-Meleon in terms of HTML5 compliance and performance. However, K-Meleon is still better in terms of RAM usage, which is crucial in memory-constrained environments. I hope to see improvements of Otter Browser in this area.

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #1 –
It's no surprise that Otter/QtWebKit is effectively the same as Qupzilla, and I'm pleased to see K-Meleon doing well. I liked that browser back in the early 2000s, thought it died, and was happy to hear of its recent revival.
 

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #2 –
I think that Otter and K-Meleon developers should work together.

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Epic on

I think that Otter and K-Meleon developers should work together.

Perhaps there's room for cooperation when addressing Windows platform.

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #4 –
Just wondering why the QtWebEngine version of Otter for Windows is not availabe via an .exe file?  I have the QtWebKit version installed through an .exe file.  I am not sure how to deal with .zip files.  Can I have both a QtWebEngine version of Otter and a WebKit version of Otter as separate programs on the same computer?

(I find the QtWebKit version to be light, indeed, on resources compared to other browsers, but I'd like to try the QtWebEngine version since the article seems to recommend it as being even lighter on resources.)

Thank you.

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #5 –
i think pale-moon (26.1.1) is faster than k-meleon...

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #6 –
I am happy that the Otter teams work is getting recognised.
However the problem with Otter and RAM comes from the fact that ~50% of Otter code is just pure QT. For those that don't know QT is a programmer tool that is used to create everything that your eye can see when using Otter, plus some other things as well. QT is what is called a GUI framework(but it has other functionality beyond just GUI).
While QT is maybe even the best GUI framework around, it never was or wanted to be lightweight. That is why when you launch Otter, Otter has to load so many QT libraries into RAM.
Optimisations can be done, but those would be probably very tough for our devs and they would take precious time that could be used for developing new features and bugfixing.

Re: Otter Browser is the best lightweight web browser

Reply #7 –
@treego, QtWebEngine backend is still marked as experimental, and since it is heavy it is not distributed in all flavors.
You can just unpack it somewhere and yes, you can have both, and by default both will use the same settings folder and share session (but not cache and cookies).
In fact you can have both backends in single binary, including ability to have tab using QtWebKit next to tab with QtWebEngine but it become complicated since Qt 5.6 ships only with the latter (although there is chance to get unofficial QtWebKit builds for 5.6)...

@bluedragon77, it's better to call it just a framework, only few Qt modules are UI related. ;-)
And it is not true that they are sacrificing performance, but well, if you want more features then you usually must expect higher resources usage.
Use of static build could help a bit (especially under Windows), but I'm not sure if it is possible to do that with QtWebKit or QtWebEngine.
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