Arora: Lightweight Browser

Eee users, a little poll here: who else dropped Firefox after 3.5 turned out to be a bloated monster that crashed on underpowered computers every other minute? Sure, I disabled a lot of addons, but still it crashes like crazy. I’ve been using Chrome as my primary browser for a while now, and it’s been good to me so far. Heck, even the beta versions (yes, I took a big leap and installed a beta release; I lead an exciting life) even with their tendency to crash and being unpolished and well, being so beta-like, is even better than Firefox.

In my quest to find a better browser suited for netbooks, I saw Arora. This browser is:

a lightweight cross-platform web browser. It’s free (as in free speech and free beer). Arora runs on Linux, embedded Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows and any other platforms supported by the Qt toolkit.

Arora uses the QtWebKit port of the fully standards-compliant WebKit layout engine. It features fast rendering, powerful JavaScript engine and supports Netscape plugins.

This new browser also boasts of these features:

• very fast startup
• integration with desktop environments
• smart location bar
• session management
• privacy mode
• flexible search engine management
• ClickToFlash plugin
• download manager
• WebInspector, a set of tools for web developers
• 30 translations

However, this browser has serious stability issues, kind of like that creepy ex you dumped that one time. It won’t open the My Asus Eee PC homepage without crashing halfway through. Maybe it works on a stronger system, but I won’t be using Arora until it stabilizes. But an exciting project like this is worth keeping an eye on.

Download Arora here.