Browser Recommendation

[Wildy]

I'm going to be doing a clean install on my 1.67 PB G4 when I get home in a couple of weeks, and I'm in the market for a new browser.

Tenfourfox and Camino are on the list, but also recently (thanks to the other thread on here) I've found out about Aurora, Stainless and Sunrise. I won't be viewing Flash content, but I do browse a few HTML5/JS heavy sites - so a good JS engine is a must. I was a sucker for Chrome's minimalistic UI which puts Stainless in good stead; I just dislike needless clutter.

I will of course be testing these myself, but can't access my PB for a couple of weeks. So does anyone have any recommendations on a browser which launchess fast, handles JS well and doesn't hog memory?

Many thanks.



P.S. Not sure whether this deserves a new thread, but didn't want to be accused of thread hijacking either - can't win!

 

[justperry]

I'm going to be doing a clean install on my 1.67 PB G4 when I get home in a couple of weeks, and I'm in the market for a new browser.

Tenfourfox and Camino are on the list, but also recently (thanks to the other thread on here) I've found out about Aurora, Stainless and Sunrise. I won't be viewing Flash content, but I do browse a few HTML5/JS heavy sites - so a good JS engine is a must. I was a sucker for Chrome's minimalistic UI which puts Stainless in good stead; I just dislike needless clutter.

I will of course be testing these myself, but can't access my PB for a couple of weeks. So does anyone have any recommendations on a browser which launchess fast, handles JS well and doesn't hog memory?

Many thanks.



P.S. Not sure whether this deserves a new thread, but didn't want to be accused of thread hijacking either - can't win!

Why not just use Safari, with extensions of, they slow down safari considerably.
Depends also how much RAM you have, I have the same Powerbook but the lower slot is having this infamous problem, running on 1 GB only and if I both run many tabs and iTunes they both get Sloooow.
I have the following on my mac but haven't tried them all:

Thunderbird
TenFourFox
Sunrise2
Shiira
Stainless
SeaMonkey
OmniWeb
Opera
Safari
Netscape
Navigator
Internet Explorer
iCab
Flock
Firefox
Cruz
Camino

 

[Hrududu]

On my PowerBook G4 1.5GHz I use 3 browsers now. I still prefer Safari over all, but if I found that Camino and TenFourFox both have their place too. Camino is great at sipping less battery since it doesn't load flash content until you tell it to. Thats great when there is a chance you'll want to view a video, but don't need all the ads & other flash crap clogging up the system (think Yahoo). TFF is the one that uses the least amount of RAM it seems and does great for times when I know I have no use for flash (craigslist, email, eBay) and it won't kill my battery. At the same time, both Camino and TFF feel slower at loading page content than Safari. TFF is fantastic on my G5's, but I don't think its really as good a browser on the G4. I stand by those 3 personally.

 

[justperry]

On my PowerBook G4 1.5GHz I use 3 browsers now. I still prefer Safari over all, but if I found that Camino and TenFourFox both have their place too. Camino is great at sipping less battery since it doesn't load flash content until you tell it to. Thats great when there is a chance you'll want to view a video, but don't need all the ads & other flash crap clogging up the system (think Yahoo). TFF is the one that uses the least amount of RAM it seems and does great for times when I know I have no use for flash (craigslist, email, eBay) and it won't kill my battery. At the same time, both Camino and TFF feel slower at loading page content than Safari. TFF is fantastic on my G5's, but I don't think its really as good a browser on the G4. I stand by those 3 personally.

I rarely use my powerbook on the battery so I don't need to think about that, well, worse, the battery is only lasting max 30 minutes so only good for when there is a power cut.

Overall I don't use anything else than safari, only when safari refuses to load a page I try others, Firefox is not one of them anymore, takes forever to start up and is slooooow.
Tried all of them but Safari is overall the best, wish the extensions wouldn't slow it down so much, so now I just leave it of.
My main problem with my laptop is that the lower RAM slot does not work(Thanks Apple for not fixing the firmware) so I have only 1 GB available, also I think OS X VM sucks, if I switch it of it is much faster, problem is though that if it nears the 1GB I need to be quick to free memory, otherwise it will crash.

 

[Ariii]

By the way... Opera can get really buggy. Multiple times, I've had to reboot due to numerous Opera problems. This was just in the first week I had it, I later had to remove it.

 

[zen.state]

Camino is the best all round IMO. I have tested virtually every single one that justperry lists and Camino is by far the most efficient. Uses the least CPU and all round resources including a very low memory footprint.

Omniweb is also very efficient but not quite at the level of Camino.

TenFourFox is a complete and utter hog of resources. It's almost disgusting.

A word of advice for everyone is to use a utility like menumeters or istat menus in your menubar and pay attention to how much of your system your apps consume.

Pick apps based on a combination of features and low system saturation and it will help you get far more out of your PowerPC chip.

 

[Starfighter]

Yes, Camino is the way to go. I have run Stainless for a while on my PB and it does well but as with Sunrise - not better than Camino. Just about the same.

 

[zen.state]

Yes, Camino is the way to go. I have run Stainless for a while on my PB and it does well but as with Sunrise - not better than Camino. Just about the same.

Sunrise, Stainless, Opera and SeaMonkey really lack decent bookmark management which immediately makes them all next to useless for me since I have a billion bookmarks. They can't even import/export well if at all.

 

[Starfighter]

Sunrise, Stainless, Opera and SeaMonkey really lack decent bookmark management which immediately makes them all next to useless for me since I have a billion bookmarks. They can't even import/export well if at all.

True! I have almost never had any use for my exported bookmark-file... But I found it to be pretty cool that I could drag and drop my quick bookmarks (I don't really know what to call them, those in a bar with clickable favicons) between most of the browsers. But yeah, I only have about 15 of them. More would be tedious to move by hand.

 

[eyoungren]

By the way... Opera can get really buggy. Multiple times, I've had to reboot due to numerous Opera problems. This was just in the first week I had it, I later had to remove it.

On PowerPC Mac, don't use any version of Opera above 10.20 beta 10.20 will still give you full screen and private tabs but any build above that is buggy. 10.50 had a horrendous issue where anything you typed in would come out in very slow spurts. They "fixed" this in the 10.6 versions (10.72 being the last for PowePC) but the underlying problems causing issues were never fixed. One of the biggest bugs on versions above 10.20 is that when Opera crashes the running instance cannot be forced quit. Which prevents you from reloading Opera. Only a restart solves the matter. I think this is because they were coding for both Intel and PowerPC at the time.

Personally, I use Opera 10.10 alpha when I use Opera. It's more stable than 10.20 (although 10.20 is stable) and it still has full screen.

 

[Ariii]

On PowerPC Mac, don't use any version of Opera above 10.20 beta 10.20 will still give you full screen and private tabs but any build above that is buggy. 10.50 had a horrendous issue where anything you typed in would come out in very slow spurts. They "fixed" this in the 10.6 versions (10.72 being the last for PowePC) but the underlying problems causing issues were never fixed. One of the biggest bugs on versions above 10.20 is that when Opera crashes the running instance cannot be forced quit. Which prevents you from reloading Opera. Only a restart solves the matter. I think this is because they were coding for both Intel and PowerPC at the time.

Personally, I use Opera 10.10 alpha when I use Opera. It's more stable than 10.20 (although 10.20 is stable) and it still has full screen.

I just noticed... I had those two problems when I used it, and a couple more. Thanks!

 

[Wildy]

Thanks for the recommendations everyone . Last time I used Firefox (on Windows) it was a complete memory hog, so it's a shame to see they didn't resolve it in Tenfourfox. I don't have any extensions running in Safari save AdBlocker, which only increases performance from what I've experienced. RAM is maxed out too.

I think I'll definitely be giving Camino a try, and possibly Stainless too.

One thing I noticed is that there's no comprehensive PPC browser benchmark - so I'll probably download the lot of them and post up some results.

Thanks guys.

 

[eyoungren]

You might try TFF 14. I'm using it right now and it flys. I mentioned in another thread that TFF 13+ messes with the TorButton addon, but I made an assumption based on TFF 13 only. TFF14 seems faster than Aurorafox (versions 14, 15 and 16 at the moment) and seems to be handling memory load quite well.

Worth a test run anyway.

 

[Wildy]

Thanks for the heads up - I wasn't meaning to appear as dismissing any thing, I will still be testing all of them!

 

[justperry]

Camino is the best all round IMO. I have tested virtually every single one that justperry lists and Camino is by far the most efficient. Uses the least CPU and all round resources including a very low memory footprint.

Omniweb is also very efficient but not quite at the level of Camino.

TenFourFox is a complete and utter hog of resources. It's almost disgusting.

A word of advice for everyone is to use a utility like menumeters or istat menus in your menubar and pay attention to how much of your system your apps consume.

Pick apps based on a combination of features and low system saturation and it will help you get far more out of your PowerPC chip.

Good advice, I use that one since I don't know forever, small memory usage and you can monitor what your system is up to.

Actually, after all these comments I will try Camino and others as well to see if it won't clog my memory.

EDIT: I just tried Camino for a couple of hours, wow, it is much better than safari for me with my limited RAM, much faster, will use this for a while, see if it keeps up when lots of tabs open.

 

[DrakkenWar]

Another + for Camino

As far as PPC browsers go, I have to agree that Camino is really the way to go. I found it years ago when my daily driver was a DA/450 on 10.4 and I have not looked back. I do have Opera, Sunrise and Firefox for mucking about with. But to get things done webwise? Camino is where it's at. I wish I could give more props to TTF, but in my experience? It was a pain to install, and just did not live up to what I thought it would be.

 

[Nameci]

Sunrise is a fast browser, but there are some things that I have not liked. It is lacking in features though it is by far on my experience the fastest.

Camino is second in terms of speed, but for some reason or another, I prefer to use Safari.