Speed Up with Midori!

Sometimes, human minds get stuck without a reason between two options, jumping from the one to the other, never finding exactly what they are looking for.

This is what happens to most people with today’s browsers. Almost no one completely likes Firefox and Chrome for their own personal reasons, but everyone keeps trying both when a newer version becomes available. Time to make a step towards something “greener” and give Midori a try!

Midori is a part of Xfce’s Goodies component and as Xfce could be characterized as the “little brother” of Gnome, we Gnome users may take advantage and shouldn’t hesitate at all to use such great applications. But what makes Midori so great?

Midori is a really lightweight, very fast and responsive browser that is also stable and quite sufficient for the daily use of most Linux users around the world. Although the browser hasn’t reached the 1.0 version, it is under development for almost 5 years now and is currently ready for action.

Main Screen

Midori’s main screen is simple and straight forward. There is nothing missing here, and to be precise you will find some things that you wish you’d had on Firefox and Chrome!

From left to right you see: “Open New Tab”, “Back”, Forward”, “Go to Next Subpage”, “Reload”, “Bookmark”, “Url Bar”, “Search Bar”, “Reopen Closed Tab”, “Menu Button”. What I found very useful is the “Reopen Closed Tab” button that pops a list of closed tabs when pressed and you can find and open what you want quickly and efficiently. No comparison with Chrome and Firefox here.

On the main screen you see the “Speed Dial” where you can set the websites you like, instead of hoping that Chrome will detect your habits correctly, and finally put “that website” on your speed dial.

Search Engines

You can search straight from the Url bar, or from the search bar using a set of popular search engines that come with Midori by default. You can always add more search engines from the options.

Compatibility

Midori is doing perfectly on Acid3 test, but is over a almost points behind Chrome 21 (437) on HTML 5 compatibility. Not a very bad score though as it is very close to the score Firefox 14 achieves (347).

Extensions

Unfortunately there is no app market for Midori, so you are not going to find the myriads of different things found on Firefox and Chrome, but thankfully some very useful extensions are there to save the day on everyday usage like an ad blocker and a little extension that colors every tab uniquely for better separation. 

You will also find a Cookie Manager, a Feed Panel, a Mouse Gestures extension that allows you to control Midori by moving the mouse, a Clock, a Toolbar Editor and the ability to use your own scripts (in C or Vala) and whatever they do.

Sidepanel

Midori’s sidepanel is an element that reminds me of Opera’s philosophy. You will find useful things there like your downloads, the browsing history and your bookmarks. You can view/hide the sidepanel whenever you want and you can also put it either left, or right.

Conclusion

Midori is a very unique lightweight and serious web browser that will definitely cover the needs of the everyday user. It is fully integrated with GTK2 and GTK3, it renders fast using the WebKit engine, supports HTML 5 and offers the simplest way on doing anything. Why not give Midori a try for a change? I am sure that many of you will be amazed!

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