Hi Eldee, My experience with WebKit-based Epiphany isn't so pleasant at the moment. It'll be in "frozen" state occasionally. To "disable JavaScript" does help a little bit. But it turns off some flash plugins I'd like to play.
As for the performance, I have Firefox 3.1b2 and Epiphany 2.24.2 running on the same OpenSolaris 2008.11 b105 box. prstat shows: 1413 alfred 440M 263M sleep 59 0 0:31:20 4.9% firefox-bin/9 7662 alfred 263M 140M sleep 59 0 0:00:25 0.0% epiphany/1 Firefox has 2 windows and around 40 tabs, Epiphany has 3 tabs. From the memory footprint, it's not as lightweight as I expect. I suspect something can be improved with my build (with Sun Studio Express) however. As GNOME applications migrate from Firefox Gecko to WebKit/GTK+, WebKit will be integrated into OpenSolaris in the near future. It'll be nice to have Epiphany in the OpenSolaris contrib repository: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/sw-porters/contributing/. To have different choices will be always a good news for OpenSolaris users. Thanks, -Alfred Eldee Stephens wrote: > just for kicks, i went ahead and built the current release levels of epiphany > and webkit to see if they fared any better performance-wise than the > contributed firefox builds i've been using. and while the build was fairly > simple (only a few changes here and there), the results have been, well, > mixed. for some reason the browser will essentially 'freeze' its contents > during DNS lookups among other times. some sites seem to be fine, but it > does seem related to networking as no matter how complex the page is > rendering-wise, if opened from a local copy everything is well. and the > process never eats up much CPU time either. > > i suppose there are a few performance issues with the webkit GTK port -- as > i've seen in other forums -- but i didn't expect this. nonetheless i love > the browser; lightweight, well integrated into GNOME, it would be nice if > this was built as a standard offering in future opensolaris releases. my > only interest was to get something lighter than firefox, but the gecko-based > epiphany builds still need XUL, so i don't see the point if you're not using > webkit. i gather from previous discussions here that there doesn't seem to > be too much interest in the community in offering epiphany as a second-choice > browser for future opensolaris releases. > > i'd be happy to offer help to others wajnting to repeat my build. just ping > me. > > -- eldee @ IBMUS >
