Arora

This week I started using the Arora web browser. It's a lightweight, pre-1.0 quality browser that was started as a wrapper around QtWebkit, which is the Qt library's wrapper around Webkit, which is Apple's fork of KHTML, which is the HTML engine of Konqueror, which is KDE's default web browser. Next October, Kubuntu 9.10 might make Arora its default browser, and even though Konqueror will still be available I thought I'd try out the new kid on the block.

After two days of use it's not bad. It's crashed a couple times, but it's only existed for a few months so that's to be expected. It has a privacy mode that's useful in preventing web sites from building an advertising profile about you. It doesn't have much ad blocking capability, which is a huge step back in functionality from Firefox and Konqueror. It doesn't appear to have per-site script disabling functionality like Firefox with NoScript.

I'll consider making it my default browser when they get all of the Kubuntu 9.10 browser requirements implemented, but without NoScript I can't see myself using it exclusively.