8 Small Footprint Web Browsers For Linux Users

8 Small Footprint Web Browsers For Linux Users

Web browsers should always be lightweight and should have a small footprint. 

This means that they should take up the least amount of your system's resources. 

Here are some open source initiatives  That have been counted.

Netsurf

Small as a mouse, fast as a cheetah and available for free. NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser forRISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux), Mac OS X, and more.

Whether you want to check your webmail, read the news or post to discussion forums, NetSurf is your lightweight gateway to the world wide web. Actively developed, NetSurf is continually evolving and improving.

NetSurf features

• Web standards: HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1
• Image formats including: PNG, GIF, JPEG, SVG, and BMP
• HTTPS for secure online transactions
• Unicode text
• Web page thumbnailing
• Local history trees
• Global history
• Hotlist manager (bookmarks)
• Cookie manager
• URL completion
• Text selection
• Scale view
• Search-as-you-type text search highlighting
• Save pages complete with images
• Fast, lightweight layout and rendering engine

QupZilla

QupZilla is a free and open-source web browser, intended for general users. It allows seamless integration with users' desktop environments and has several distinguishing features positively received by reviewers. QupZilla is licensed under GPLv3.

 Midori

Midori is blazing fast, utilizing the latest web technologies and a smallbut dexterous array of extensions provide all the essential features.

Midori's source code is freely available for anyone to download and modify, leading to active development and a diverse feature set.

Midori handles all the latest web technologies like HTML 5 and CSS3. Listen to music on Rdio, play a game of Angry Birds, and more.

The lightweight webkit rendering engine lends it the same supremacy in speed that has spurred the growth of Google Chrome.

Midori may only be a little program, but it supports many of the most popular parts of the web, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify and Rdio.

Certain sites, including YouTube and Spotify, will require Adobe Flash Player.

Midori features built-in privacy tools, including script disabling, third-party cookie blocking, stripping referrer details and automatic history clearing after a set amount of time.

There's also an integrated adblocker and cookie manager installed (but not enabled) under the included extensions.

Uzbl

Uzbl follows the UNIX philosophy - "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." Uzbl comes in different flavors:

Epiphany

Epiphany is a simple web browser primarily intended for the GNOME desktop which works acceptably with other desktop environments as well.

The browser was forked from Galeon after developers' disagreements about Galeon's growing complexity. Since then Web has been developed as part of the GNOME project and uses most of GNOME's technology and settings when applicable. It is part of the GNOME Core Applications. As required by the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), Web maintains the clean and simple graphical user interface with only a required minimum number of features exposed to users by default. The browser's functionality and configurability can be extended with official and third-party extensions.

Dillo

Dillo is a multi-platform graphical web browser known for its speed and small footprint.

Dillo is written in C and C++.

Dillo is based on FLTK, the Fast Light Toolkit (statically-linked by default!).

Dillo is free software made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).

Dillo strives to be friendly both to users and developers.

Dillo helps web authors to comply with web standards by using the bug meter.

ELinks

ELinks is a program for browsing the web in text mode. The goal of the project has from the beginning been to provide a feature-rich text mode browser with an open patches/features inclusion policy and active development. One of these features is that ELinks includes Links-Lua which adds scripting capabilities to ELinks.

ELinks is an advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web (HTTP/FTP/..) browser. ELinks can render both frames and tables, is highly customizable and can be extended via Lua or Guile scripts. It is quite portable and runs on a variety of platforms.

• HTML3 (but will eat most HTML tag soup and also a lot of HTML4 stuff)
• Local file support
• HTTP authentication
• Proxy authentication
• Cute menus and dialogs
• Tabbed browsing
• Translated to many languages
• Full-featured history browsing
• Keybinding manager to easily change bindings or add new ones
• Forms history
• Completion and history in commonly used input dialogs
• Typeahead searches
• Highly configurable through menus and/or human readable text files
• Support for browser scripting (Lua, Guile, Perl)
• Hiearchic bookmarks

Lynx

Lynx is a text browser for the World Wide Web. It runs on Unix, MacOS, VMS, Windows 95/98/NT, DOS386+ (but not 3.1, 3.11), as well as OS/2 EMX.