suggestions for replacing default browser in U-lite
 

I installed U-lite on a 1GHz Dell optiplex GX-150, 512 SDRAM. The system is going to be given to a complete Linux beginner. I would like to replace Kazehakase with a separate web browser and file manager.

I'm looking for a user-friendly browser and file manager that will run nicely on the hardware and work well with the distro. The computer runs U-lite and its default applications great.

Any suggestions? I'm going for easy and familiar over cutting edge and chic.

PCMANFM file manager, grab also lxappearance and lxterminal, lxpanel optional

check out Arora, or maybe Ubzl?

Thanks linus72. On closer inspection I discovered U-lite already has PCMan file manager. It looks good. The other lxde packages are on there too.

As for browsers, I checked out Ubzl and it sounds a little to advanced for my purpose. Arora looks ok. Do you know if it'll run well on the hardware in question?

Any suggestions for a web browser?

With 512 MB of ram and a 1GHz clock, I would think that just about any web browser would be fine: even the heavier ones:
Eg. firefox, chromium, epiphany etc.

What have you tried so far? What was wrong with it?

Evo2.

I haven't tried any browsers yet. I'm looking for a light and simple one. I could try a range of browsers, but I was hoping for some recomendations.

Well, up until a month ago I happily was using a notebook with 230Mb of ram, and a 933 MHz crusoe processor with both epiphany and firefox (Debians unbranded iceweasel binary).

Evo2.

You could run about any browser you prefer on that hardware.

Most of the software your distro runs by default seems to be GTK+ based. Some people are quite religious about that and will suggest that you should be using a GTK+ based browser (that would sort out Arora as a choice, since it's built using Qt).

My opinion in that regard is quite different though. You should be using whatever enhances your productivity. This is specially true for web browsers because the heavy part of a browser nowadays is not the UI, but the web rendering engine (gecko, khtml, webkit or whatever it uses). That's why it really doesn't matter if you use Firefox or Kazehakase, or whatever else.

In my experience, the difference in RAM usage in all the modern browsers is negligible after a few hours. All of them are quite heavy. There are lighter things though, as long as you are willing to sacrifice features (dillo, links -g and quite a lot of text-based browsers like links, elinks, w3m, lynx and many more).

Opera is a bit lighter though. I personally don't like it because of it's closed source nature, and a few other rough edges, including how badly it handles dark color schemes. Seamonkey 2 works quite well and is not tied to either Qt or GTK+, it features most of the cool stuff that Firefox has as well. Chromium in Linux has still some problems (the last time I tried it). It seems a bit unstable, wastes a bit more RAM than the rest and lacks some functionality like proper SSL keys handling. It works best than the rest with flash though, as long as you don't mind closing and restarting it each times the cpu usage goes mad. Your mileage may vary.

Browser , go with Firefox and maybe Chrome as a backup browser.

The webkit browsers like midori, arora, uzbl are all still pretty much beta.

Doesn't chome/chromium use webkit?

Evo2.

There is also a Firefox for gtk+, Minefield

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful info.

I installed Firefox. I was hoping it would be a pinch faster, but its decent. I guess the limitation is the processor not the browsers? I then installed Seamonkey. It was comparable in speed. Firefox seemed to render the pages a little smoother though (visually). Also the version of seamonkey I got through synaptic apparently wasn't up-to-date, because the first time I ran it, it went to a site offering me an upgrade download.

So I'm going to leave Firefox on there. I used everyone's info in the evaluation process. I really appreciate it.

On an unrelated note, working with U-lite for more than 1 minute hurts my eyes. It is hazy, almost out-of-focus. The monitor I'm using only goes to 85Hz (1024x 768), but I've used 85Hz monitors before and the picture was way sharper than this. Is this something to do with LXDE, or U-lite, or ??

I couldn't really say. Both the hardware and the graphics driver could influence that. The desktop of choice shouldn't have any relevance here. 85hz is more than adequate for any regular user. It's usually below 60hz when you have to start worrying.

I tried a different monitor and it was much better. The first two monitors I tried must be low quality.