I’ve been experimenting with different browsers for the past few days, and while I really want to just use w3m all the time, its a pain if you actually want to view certain images (If you can tell me how to configure a keystroke to open an image in an external image viewer, I’d be forever in your debt). So I searched for a lightweight graphical browser, and Kazehakase seemed like the obvious choice.
For some reason, most browsers will try to display some websites with fonts that look terrible on GNU/Linux. I’m guessing that certain sites specify proprietary fonts that should be used, but either the font isn’t installed or it can’t be rendered correctly without some proprietary technology. Whatever the reason is, the terrible fonts that are displayed really make reading unbearable.
Because of this, I would always uncheck the “Allow pages to choose their own fonts” box in the Firefox preferences. I was disappointed to see that this didn’t appear to be an option in Kazehakase, at least in the version I was using—0.5.5. Luckily, if you type about:config in the address bar or select “Detailed Preferences” in the Edit menu (when Expert UI level is set), you can change browser.display.use_document_fonts to 0 and this fixes the problem.
Now I just need to figure out how to disable the box asking me to download Adobe Flash every time I come across a site with an embedded YouTube video…
2 responses so far ↓
Jake // September 18, 2008 at 9:09 pm
In the spirit of lightweightness that rivals w3m, you may want to try the graphical version of Links2 (use the -g option) or Dillo. If you want something lightweight, but with CSS, but without the bulkiness of Gecko (like Kazehakase) try Hv3 or NetSurf. The former is better in my opinion.
I am using Links 2 in terminal mode at the moment though.
Peter // September 18, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Thanks for the tip, I’m going to give Links2 a try.
I actually just recently ditched Kazehakase when I discovered the Vimperator plugin for Firefox. Yes, Firefox isn’t quite as lightweight as w3m
, but I think mainly what I’m looking for is a browser that is controllable entirely with the keyboard. I’m going to give Links2 a try though, since I actually don’t care too much about CSS and find that often times it gets in the way of the content. There are just certain graphics that you need to be able to view (like Make magazine’s blog, which is pretty boring without photos).