What are the best lightweight open source browser engines? Not specific browsers, but the engines themselves, such as Webkit, blink, Qtwebengine, and others
If some of you can go in deph about:
Memory usage and speed difference between the different browser engines.
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Any browsers that currently use them and what are these engines like?
Duktape is used by NetSurf, but the JS implementation (in NetSurf) is incomplete - specifically there’s no dynamic layout engine so a lot of stuff doesn’t work.
Partial support is sadly pretty useless at present. Developers target ‘latest’ big engines, so unless you are up to yesterday’s spec, there is a good chance their JavaScript will give you nothing but errors.
Lately I been using qtwebengine on Falkon browser, but with it being a chromium based engine, was hoping for alternatives, like webkit and others.
elinks, of course
The forks are good. Looks like someone new wants to maintain w3m which includes features I have been waiting for.
Honestly, “browser engine” and “lightweight” currently don’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re going for something with very little functionality compared to Webkit or Gecko or whatever. We can hope that changes with time, but I don’t think there are a lot of prospects.
As far as “little functionality” options, there’s the Dillo browser. I’m not sure its engine is really easily “seperable”, so to do so might be some work. It’s surprisingly maintained. Its latest release is from 3 months ago. It’s definitely extremely lightweight. (Unless you’re comparing it against, say, elinks or something.)
As for somewhat promising projects that are not yet anywhere near ready for prime time, there’s the Ladybird browser. Again, I don’t know how seperable the engine is. And I don’t know how lightweight this one is either.
You are right. I guess I was interested in web engines with as much or close to as much functionality as web kit or gecko but maybe some that might be lighter on resource usage as i’m using it.
I heard of one browser engine made in a colab with Samsung and Mozilla called Servo made with rust and that it was meant to be lower resourced then todays browsers engines.
I just installed Epiphany browser earlier today running off of Webkit, it doesn’t have as many built in features as Falcon but for Fediverse sites it works with little issue. But sites with more adverts and javascipt things very well might slow to a crawl quickly on that.
Qtwebengine is just Chromium with qt on top.
I had acknowledged that it was based on Chromium, do you know of any notable alternatives?
