Looking for a browser with little dependency and CSS

phantom_cyph · 11-19-2008, 02:15 PM

Title almost says it all. I was sort of hoping I could install Epiphany, as it is light, but it says it is based on Mozilla Firefox, which has more dependencies than Solomon had grandchildren. And, it is based on the "gecko engine", and I am not sure if you can just download the engine by itself or not.

So this is pretty much what I need: a web browser with CSS support and few dependencies. I did use Dillo, but being without any CSS support, I can't view hardly anything, I can't even log on to Facebook or sites like that. Don't necessarily need Javascript, but CSS is a must so there is at least structure.

Ideas anyone?

(BTW - Dependencies include libraries, as I am building from Slackware 11 package by package. I need to stay away from glib as it is huge and my distribution has to stay small. I have about 30 megs to get the browser and dependencies in to.)

ErV · 11-19-2008, 03:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phantom_cyph

Ideas anyone?

Try opera.
According to the data on my system, total size of installed opera-9.52-i386 (static build) is about 23 megabytes.

Dependnencies include:

Code:

ash-3.1$ ldd opera
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7e50000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7e42000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0xb7e3a000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0xb7e23000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7dee000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7dea000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7dd5000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7cef000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb7cc9000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7cbe000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7b72000)
        libxcb-xlib.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-xlib.so.0 (0xb7b70000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7b58000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb7b55000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f38000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb7b50000)

As you can see, there is no glib and everything is very standard.
I think opera is what you want.

If you have VERY little amount of free space, you should disable opera's browser cache.

i92guboj · 11-19-2008, 04:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phantom_cyph

Title almost says it all. I was sort of hoping I could install Epiphany, as it is light, but it says it is based on Mozilla Firefox, which has more dependencies than Solomon had grandchildren. And, it is based on the "gecko engine", and I am not sure if you can just download the engine by itself or not.

The latest versions of epiphany should work with xulrunner, no need to have firefox installed. However, size-wise, there's not much difference. Provided that you have recent sources for xulrunner and epiphany all should be smooth. Even firefox 3.x is a small package that also depends on xulrunner, it no longer ships the gecko engine inside firefox itself.

If you don't care about it being closed source, you can use an static build of opera as well. It shouldn't require nothing but a bare system with X to run. If you have qt4 there's also arora, which uses webkit and is very small and lean.

phantom_cyph · 11-19-2008, 10:31 PM

Well, I am working with a 2.4.3 kernel (and have to stay with it for various reasons) so Firefox 3.0 will not work as it requires a version of glibc which requires a 2.6 kernel. Do the latest versions of epiphany work with 2.4? And, does xulrunner get rid of the dependencies? I personally like Epiphany better than Opera because I think it's cleaner, but Opera may be the way to go as sites like Yahoo! actually support it.

ErV · 11-19-2008, 10:45 PM

comment removed

i92guboj · 11-20-2008, 06:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phantom_cyph

Well, I am working with a 2.4.3 kernel (and have to stay with it for various reasons) so Firefox 3.0 will not work as it requires a version of glibc which requires a 2.6 kernel. Do the latest versions of epiphany work with 2.4? And, does xulrunner get rid of the dependencies? I personally like Epiphany better than Opera because I think it's cleaner, but Opera may be the way to go as sites like Yahoo! actually support it.

xulrunner will take care of the dependency against seamonkey or firefox, but note that xulrunner itself is almost as big as either of them. The big part of xulrunner, seamonkey and firefox (monolithic, not newer versions) is gecko itself, so the size is not too different. If you don't care about that, then it's fine and xulrunner might seem like the way to go.

Note however that that will take care only of the gecko part. Epiphany will still need (probably, since I don't use it) a big bunch of extra dependencies related to gnome stuff. There's nothing xulrunner can do about that since after all epiphany is the default gnome browser. If you use gnome that won't be a problem of course.

Besides that, opera is probably the best option, even though I wouldn't use it, certainly, but that's just my personal taste.