QupZilla Browser

[Anupam]

User Panzer made a suggestion of QupZilla web browser on the main site.

The site of QupZilla is here :

http://www.qupzilla.co.cc/

It is a webkit based browser, and is available for Windows and Linux, on both 32 and 64 bit versions.

I was impressed by the screenshots, and so I decided to download it.

I think this browser has a lot of potential of becoming a main stream browser. The browser has good look and feel. The default theme was Windows, which made it look like IE a bit. I changed it to Mac theme, and it started to look quite sleek. There are four themes available, and I am sure one would find one to suit them. The appearance looks quite customizable.

The preferences available are what you would expect from a main stream browser.

It has AdBlock with EasyList. It has a built-in download manager, RSS feed manager, cookies manager. It has password manager too, like other browsers. It has private browsing too.

The speed is also quite good, and seems lightweight.

The bookmarks manager look good, and you can import bookmarks from Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or an HTML file. You can also search within bookmarks from the given search bar.

I found this to be quite true from their About section on the site :

QupZilla's main aim is to be a very fast and very stable QtWebKit browser available to everyone. There are already a lot of QtWebKit browsers available, but they are either bound to the KDE environment (rekonq), are not actively developed or very unstable and miss important features. But there is missing a multiplatform, modern and actively developed browser. QupZilla is trying to fill this gap by providing a very stable browsing experience.

There are a lot of webkit browsers available like QtWeb, Arora, but I found all of them lacking in features. What they have said about QupZilla seems to be true.

Overall, I am quite impressed with this browser, and would be keeping a watch on its development. I am wondering why we never heard of this browser before.

MC, who liked QtWeb, would like this browser for sure, I guess .

I just found one issue so far. I opened the download manager, and it won't close. I will be reporting this issue to them.

And GJ has one more browser to review, and include in his list, I think .

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by Anupam

MC, who liked QtWeb, would like this browser for sure, I guess .

Well I might not like this one just to be annoying

My cable is now functional again so I'm back with Linux, but if I can force myself to use Windows twice in the same day, I might have a look at this later

[Anupam]

We will see .

Its available for Linux too, so you can try on Linux itself

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by Anupam

We will see .

Its available for Linux too, so you can try on Linux itself

Yep, plain sailing as a .deb for Ubuntu etc., but I won't risk messing up what I currently have here by trying to install it into Mageia.

[kendall.a]

It sounds to me like Anupam has found a Hot Find! and needs to write it up as an article over at the main site!!!!


P.S. I'd download it and try it in either Mint or Peppermint if I knew which download to use and then what to do with the download once I had it?!

[Anupam]

Well, I am certainly impressed by the browser so far, just by initial usage.

Our in-house browser editor GJ should take a look, and if he finds it worthy, then maybe we can think about writing a hot find for it. GJ would be the right one to write, since he is the browser expert.

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by kendall

It sounds to me like Anupam has found a Hot Find! and needs to write it up as an article over at the main site!!!!


P.S. I'd download it and try it in either Mint or Peppermint if I knew which download to use and then what to do with the download once I had it?!

This should work for Mint:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nowrep/qupzilla
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qupzilla

[George.J]

The browser feels like QtWeb which is great because I already love QtWeb. After playing around with the browser for a few minutes, two of the shortcomings that I found out when compared with QtWeb are 1. Save as PDF option and 2. Reset the browser.

QtWeb is highly praised for its portability and is the best portable browser to date among all I've tested. First, it's just a single .exe file and all the components are merged into it. Second, it doesn't write any settings or any trolltech stuff into the registry. Third, there are two options for 'Resetting' the browser . 'Reset' button does the same as most other browsers to reset history, cache, password, web searches including resetting the settings to default. Another one is 'Quit With full reset'. Just a single click lets the browser to be 'reborn' again as if you're installing or extracting the browser for first time.

If you don't care about portability then, Qupzilla is worth a treat compared to QtWeb. All the features have been implemented beautifully. The preferences panel is neatly arranged, the tabs are well implemeted, the dual address bar, floating search bar, customizability...most of them are implemented better than QtWeb. Also it does shows the ip address of every location in the status bar. I find no reason why I shouldn't switch.

[George.J]

But I won't be able to feature it's homepage qupzilla.co.cc because the co.cc domain is not officially authorized but owned by an independent Korean company. Also Google has banned all co.cc domains because the domain is supposed to be too 'spammy', hence blocked all search results (all co.cc sites, nearly more than 11 million of them). I would have to find an alternate download location for it.

References: Google search blocks 11 million .co.cc websites to fight malware
Google blocks .co.cc, attackers are now using .co.tv

[George.J]

There is a minor flaw in the Windows default theme. The 'Reload' button is invisible. It can be remedied by choosing any other theme. I love the Mac theme. Its chic. :-)