Key features
What do they bring to the table?
As well as being lightweight— what else do these web browsers offer? Dillo, eg, is designed particularly for older hardware. It includes tabbed browsing and basic bookmarking facilities. There’s also a search engine toolbar and the browser can fetch pages over HTTPS—but that’s about all you can do with the Dillo browser.
NetSurf is a little better. It started out as a web browser for the RISC OS and like Dillo uses its own layout engine. NetSurf also provides typical web browser features, including tabbed browsing, bookmarks and also includes download and history management. Some of the features of the web browser, such as the cookie management, were ported from being RISC-only to other platforms when the browser participated in the Google Summer of Code. This also led to the development of a number of features, such as the PDF export and the HTML5 compliant Hubbub library.
Then there’s Midori which, according to its developers, was visualised as a fast and lightweight browser that also looks beautiful. It has all the usual features you’d expect from a browser, including tabbed browsing, bookmark management and a downloader. You can even create launchers and pin items to the browser’s speed dial. Midori also recognises and adds RSS, Atom, and XML feeds to your favourite desktop feed reader.
Qupzilla is another of our selection that’s very fast and uses the Blinkbased QtWebEngine. It has all standard functions that you’d expect from a modern web browser including bookmarks, history and tabs. Additionally, the browser has an RSS feed reader of its own and also includes a password manager. Qupzilla also has several interesting features, such as the ability to change its user-agent to be more appealing to certain websites and being capable of taking a screenshot of the entire page. You can also tie common actions to mouse gestures for convenient execution.
Finally, there’s Slimjet, which is built on top of Chromium. Besides all the usual features, the browser has several unique features of its own, such as the Facebook button which enables you to share any web page onto the platform with a single click. There’s also a video downloader which can grab videos from websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo ,without much effort. There’s also a photo uploader function that comes into play whenever you try to upload an image and offers to resize and compresses it for faster uploads.