01-02-2007, 01:02 PM

There has been lots of posting in this news group over the past few days on the topic of small, fast web browsers. I thought it might be helpful to post a quick summary:

Sunrise: available at http://www.sunrisebrowser.com/en/
Current version: 0.895.
Memory footprint: 22 MB real memory, 400 MB virtual memory
Bookmark Import: auto imports Safari bookmarks
Subjective: very fast to load and to load pages, supports lots of interesting features, including innovative graphical bookmarks. Somewhat quirky non-Mac looking interface, but very functional nonetheless. Missing only tabbed browsing to be a pretty nice browser. The author reports that tabbed browsing is available in the upcoming 1.0.0 release, to be made available soon.

Camino: available at http://www.caminobrowser.org/
Current version: 1.0.3
Memory footprint: 28 MB real memory, 396 MB virtual memory
Bookmark Import: Can import bookmarks from Safari, Firefox and Opera
Subjective: Very fast to load and to load pages. Uses same Gecko rendering engine from Firefox. Very much a Mac application, sporting a very nice look n feel that Mac users will be quite comfortable with.

BonEcho: available at http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2...4/firefox-2001
Current Version: 2.0.0.1
Memory Footprint: 37 MB real memory, 397 MB virtual memory
Bookmark Import: imports Safari bookmarks
Note: This is an optimized version of Firefox 2.0.0.1. Specific apps are availalable for G5 and Intel processors.
Subjective: Fast to load, feels lightening fast to load pages. A significant speed differential over the stock Firefox offering. Looks, feels and behaves like Firefox in all regards but speed, which is much better.


As a comparative note, Safari's memory footprint is 90MB real memory and 445 MB of virtual memory. The stock Firefox 1.5 takes 34 MB of real memory and 392 MB of virtual memory. This makes Safari the "heavyweight" of the group.

Note that I have not included OmniWeb, as it is paid software, while the rest of the above are all free.

Subjectively, after playing with all of these, BonEcho seems the best of them, given the full feature set, the average memory consumption and the excellent speed of operation.

01-03-2007, 08:20 AM

Very nice roundup...food for thought.

Thanks,

Steven