Saturday, March 02, 2013

A fast browser for the Pi

Came across this thread today, although it's a week or so old, dealing with a lightweight webkit and supposedly very fast browser for the Pi.

The Pi is a wonderful machine but, of necessity, it's lacking in resources such as CPU speed and RAM.
For this reason, browsing is at times painfully slow.
And I've tried a lot of browsers including QupZilla, Midori, Luakit, UZBL and many others.

I first tried the downloadable binary in Rasbpian but this just didn't work at all for me.
No idea why not.

Nothing for it but to compile from source.
The home page for this project is here in Google Code from where you can find out how to build from source.

In a fully-updated Raspbian, you run this command

git clone https://code.google.com/p/minimal-web-browser
Next, to avoid compile errors I had to install these two dependencies

libgtk2.0-dev
libwebkitgtk-dev

Thereafter, I was able to cd to minimal-web-browser/web-1.0, run make and sudo make install.
The compile and install were very quick and took less than a minute or two for a full install.

Running the command "web" brings up the browser showing Google in about 1 second.
Impressive.
Unfortunately as I'm traveling tomorrow, I didn't get much chance to really check it out but it certainly looks very promising.

Incidentally, I tried the compile also in Gentoo on my Pi.
Although it compiled there was an error (something to do with sudo install -g dialout).
Nevertheless, the command "web" did open up the browser with Google open.
However, after a few seconds, it seg faulted and disappeared.










No comments:

Post a Comment