Midori—Two New Improvements

Those of you who have been following my blog for a long time probably know that for various reasons (to list a few—it's still in gtk2, uses webkit, has tab panel feature, it's fast, has simple, yet powerful UI, uses gstreamer for html5 video …) I'm a user (and fan) of a lightweight xfce web-browser called Midori (it's from Japanese 緑 which means green). For these past few months I've been constantly annoyed by two of it's shortcommings—loading of pages have become slooooow and very CPU intensive; and java plugins crashed the browser upon applet removal (e.g. by reloading or closing the page). Today I've figured fixes for both!

Sluggish page loading—caused by cookie manager

Today I've noticed that the very same pages that are freezing the UI upon load for a few seconds does not suffer from these issues when opened in web-app mode. So my guess was like—either user style/script or plugin fault. A simple try-and-error quickly yielded results. The plugins that is at fault is cookie manager, though I haven't got the slightest idea why. So if you suffer from similar problems, just disable cookie manager and you'll be back to the usual swiftness of webkit based browsers.

Crashing java plugin—fixed in icedtea-web-1.3

Yes, yesterday on Fedora Planet I read the release information about new icedtea-web plugin and since it contained info about google chrome fixes, I guessed it might improve my midori experience as well. However as there was still no build for fedora today morning, I decided to build it myself. So I did (was as easy as downloading the new tarbal and bumping the version in rpm spec file) and to my great joy, java applets now load faster and do not crash upon exit. What a great day!