Skipstone?

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Skipstone?
started by: bork

Posted by bork on Jan. 07 2005,21:23

There's this beautiful browser called skipstone... it uses the gecko engine (if that's the right term for it) so everything gets rendered prettily, but it's much faster than firefox (probably smaller too... it's about 400k (not including the mozilla stuff, don't know how much that takes up)

Posted by AwPhuch on Jan. 07 2005,21:55

How big would a .dsl file be after all the mozilla headers were added?

Looks pretty nice...

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on Jan. 07 2005,23:09

I know this one has been discussed before. I did run it in DSL. It seems to be a pretty nice little browser. You have to install the mozilla-browser package to get it to run and that is 26mb! I tried to see if I could strip it down but I didn't have much success.

It appears that most of what was in /usr/libs/mozilla is also in /usr/local/bin/firefox. I messed with some Lib paths in the skipstone file but this is over my head right now.

maybe a sharp linux person might want to give this one a shot? I think you might be able to strip alot of extras out of the mozilla package and get it down to a managable size.

Chris

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 10 2005,03:45

I tried out Skipstone a while back on my Peanut Linux system, which also has full-blown Mozilla installled on the machine.

My observation was that web sufing was slow. Basically, Skipstone took much less time to start up than full-blown Mozilla, but web rendering was just as slow.

If you have a need for speed, my guess is that skipstone is not the answer.

My experience (totally subjective, no tests):

(1) Dillo - Fastest browser but does not render pages well.
(2) Opera 6.x - Is actually faster than Dillo for some pages and is a full-featured browser.
(3) Opera 7.x - Not as fast as 6.x, but still faster than most. Compared to 6.x, it is a memory hog.
(4) Firefox DSL extensions - Most of the Firefox myDSL extensions are pretty fast, but they use up a lot of RAMdisk especially the GTK2 ones.
(5) Firefox that is built into DSL version 0.9.x - It takes a long time to load up and the performance is sluggish when running inside DSL embedded or on an old computer, but it is quite usable when using DSL natively on most modern computers (Pentium II or newer).
(6) Mozilla or Netscape - Takes forever and a day to start the program and web browsing is sluggish. When running KNOPPIX, I prefer to use the bloated KDE browser Konqueror because even Konquerer seems fast compared to Mozilla.

Your mileage may vary...

Posted by Delboy on Jan. 12 2005,12:36

I think the new .dsl for Opera7.54 is the best of all browsers I have tried in DSL and should be integrated into DSL Base instead of Firefox. Fast enough for me on a '96 notebook. The mail client included is better than I expected and is now the only one I use.