Saturday 5 September 2015

Otter browser...it has potential.

This originally started as a comment, but since I wrote so much I decided to turn it into a blog post.

Try otter browser:
http://otter-browser.org/
It promises to be everything that old opera was, so a bit similar to Vivaldi, except, Otter browser is open source!

Ever since Opera shifted to version 15, I just can not find a browser that I consider irreplaceable. Because Opera versions 15-25 did not support Linux I was forced to switch. My choice at that time was Chromium, and it was generally ok, it loaded web pages pretty fast and youtube just worked. But it lacks some  serious features, plus most of the interface elements are not made for the widescreen era. And it eats RAM.

However as soon as Opera 26 with linux support entered Opera's Alpha channels I switched back to Opera. At first I liked it, but the more I used it, it felt like Chromium with gimmicks. And it started to feel unclean to use a non-open source browser on an open source operating system. I do however watch Opera's blog and I admit that the latest versions are more than Chromium with gimmicks, if only it were open source.

So I gave Firefox a chance, which I still use to this day. I like it because it is more feature rich than current Opera or Chromium. However some websites, including Youtube, just don't like Firefox anymore. And Firefox actually tends to eat my CPU.

Since Vivaldi is not open source, using Vivaldi is out of the question. I have also tried using several smaller browsers like Arora(I loved it back in 2011,but now it is outdated), Epiphany, Midori, Konqueror(I wanted to try KHTML as an alternative to Webkit)...But most of them had either even less features than Chromium or they were hated by websites.(Konqueror does seem like an interesting File browser/Web browser hybrid however).

However,then I have stumbled upon Otter browser by accident when I saw a comment about it on Opera's blog. And after a few versions of it, Otter browser looks like a glimmer of light. It is rapidly gaining features every 1-2 weeks. It promises to bring most of old Opera 12.16 features. It is open source and has a repository on github. The only feature missing for me to move to it as my main browser is an https everywhere option. Plus it has a Youtube bug, but due to the youth of the project I am willing to overlook it. Oh yeah and although I am a Linux user, Otter is one of the very few browsers that still support *BSD!

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