Monday, October 5, 2009

Arora 0.10 in Kubuntu 9.10

For anyone looking to try out a lightweight browser under KDE (or even Gnome for that matter), they should definately give Arora a test run.

For the upcoming Karmic Koala release, we have worked very closely with the upstream Arora developers to ensure we have a nicely integrated browser, which can serve as an alternative to the default system browser.

For example, in this release, we see AdBlock support as well as wallet (password/form autofill) support. This was missing in the 0.9 and earlier series, and was definately a feature I missed when testing out this, otherwise, fantastic browser.

Now that it has the wallet and AdBlock features, I can heartily recommend that everyone give it a serious try. If you find the default system browser doesn't work on some of your favorite sites or you find Firefox to be a bit bloated, then you will surely love Arora.

Check out www.kubuntu.org for details on downloading the new Karmic Koala beta or if you already have the beta running, simply install Arora in Add/Remove software.

To find out more about Arora, please see www.arora-browser.org.

3 comments:

  1. If you really are searching for a fast browser try Chromium (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa). It runs much faster than Arora or Firefox on my netbook (especially scrolling is a lot smoother with Chromium).

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  2. Yup, Chromium might be faster, but it uses GTK... So it might not be welcome in a KDE environment.

    I'm really waiting for Rekonq (ugly name, I know) though, as it is based on the same core as Arora, but it's much more integrated into KDE.

    I wish I could get rid of Firefox (because of the XUL-GTK thing), but neither Arora 0.10 nor Rekonq 0.2 can handle Gmail's heavy JavaScript properly. The first one crashes, the second one keeps on reloading the page.

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  3. @ikkefc3: I've heard some horror stories about how this was coded and to be honest, I'd rather stay away from it. Arora is written cleanly, and from scratch to be multi-platform from the start, with no strange hacks to make it work.

    Plus, as Cypher states, Kubuntu is KDE based and I definately prefer Qt/KDE based applications, as they inegrate much cleaner and nicer into the system over gtk based ones.

    @Cypher: Arora 0.10.1 handles gmail fine here. I even have the themes enabled. No issue that I have seen. Not sure what component is specifically causing an issue for you, but the developer would definately be interested to fix it.

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