QupZilla - Yet another RISC OS Webkit based browser

Chris Evans.

In Chrome, click on the button and a grey shield appears at the right hand side of the address bar. Click on the shield and allow the script to run.

More feedback: QupZilla is much faster than Otter here: www.steves-digicams.com/camera-reviews takes about 3 mins to load in Otter, about 100 secs in QupZilla (JS off in both cases), compared to 69 secs using NetSurf 3.4 CI #3250, and this seems to be a fair reflection of responsiveness in general use. The JS-switching icon is very useful, and having a ‘Home’ icon at top left is useful too. The big downside is memory: Tasks is currently showing 170000k for QupZilla plus no less than 223000k in Dynamic areas, after a morning’s surfing, so even 512MB machines will struggle, I think. No problem on a Pi2 of course. But overall, an advance on Otter IMHO.

Thanks Chris, nicely done! Multimedia? on RISC OS? If you manage that and turn up to any shows, you’ll be getting hugged to death!

George T. Greenfield wrote:

compared to 69 secs using NetSurf 3.4 CI #3250

Over a minute still seems a bit slow to me. What hardware are you testing on? Could you try with CI #3288? Is there much difference with JavaScript configured off/on?

It’s a pretty big page – over 550 elements – which is why I use it as a benchmark. You can try it yourself: I included a link in my earlier post. Just retested (#3250): 69 secs (JS off); 76 secs (JS on); 48 secs (Firefox JS on, on a 3.4GHz Win7 desktop PC), time to completely render the page in all cases. Platform is a Pi2 clocked at 900MHz running RC14, on a broadband connection (average speed c. 15MB/sec).

I’ll download and test #3288 tomorrow, and report back.

I just tried the page on my work PC (Firefox, Win 7) and it took around 20 seconds. I find it ridiculous that the site’s developer thinks that that is acceptable, so I certainly can’t fault NetSurf or QupZilla for taking that long to render it.

Edit: Around 15 seconds on my personal Mac (2.8 GHz i7, 16 GB, Safari 9) on a 100 Mb/s connection. Still appalling.

George T. Greenfield wrote:

I’ll download and test #3288 tomorrow, and report back.

Thanks, and thanks for those other benchmarks. I don’t have a RISC OS computer set up right now, so I’ve been doing my NetSurf development and testing on a fast linux box.

I noticed that that page hit a particular issue relating to floats which caused layout to be unusually slow. That should be fixed in the latest build, but I’m not sure how much of an effect it will have. Most of the time seems to be spent fetching lots of large images.

Tried again this morning: general improvement on all browsers (see below) so it could have been simply less transatlantic traffic (early morning US time)?

Qupzilla (JS off): 89 secs; NS #3288 (JS off): 61 secs; NS #3288 (JS on): 66 secs.

Thanks. If you run with !Scrap on a SD card with slow write performance, you /may/ see some small improvement by setting Set NetSurf$Logging 1 to Set NetSurf$Logging 0 in the !Run file.

I see that QupZilla is now in PackMan, but I get an error when I try to install it.

Failed to install/remove package when Unpacking / Removing: Failed
Name not recognised (SWI 8) r0=11

Does anyone else get that? SWI 8 is OS_File and reason code 11 has existed since at least OS 3.1 so this error’s left me a bit confused!

“Name not recognised” means that a bad filename was given to the SWI

Makes sense. I was thinking that it was referring to the SWI name, but of course it’s using the number so clearly I just need some caffeine :)

I see that QupZilla is now in PackMan, but I get an error when I try to install it.

There was an ‘@’ in some of the file names. An installable version should be appear in the next day or so.

The fixed version is now available from PackMan.

Thanks. I’ll try it out when I get home :)

This is faster as !otter on my Panda, like the password manager, I use it more than !netsurf on the moment.
(not very secure but I can manage my router and bank account from the netherlands (ING bank)