Well, I'm posting from Midori and wow, it's come a long, long way! Grabbed the upstream Appimage. Even in a VM and as an Appimage it's responsive (minus the initial mount). Not sure I like the sidebar, but I haven't gotten to customising it other than to add NoScript which is first order of business. I like the new logo, though IDK how the OpenSUSE folk art gonna take it since Midori's new logo is essentially the "cool version". Jokes aside, let's do first impressions, in realtime as I play with it and type this:
My Review:
When I first stumbled on this project, I thought it had great potential, but I saw it dying out. Usually my predictions ar right. In this case, I'm more than happy to be wrong. The project has matured into a fully-fledged AAA browser...
1. Responsivenes: 8/10
Midori's UI is very snappy and smooth, however, performing searches causes a delay no different from firefox.
2. Look and feel: 8/10
The UI is neat and compact. No quasi-Gnome window decorations, giving the user back their stolen vertical estate. It uses the old Firefox style combined with the new, and sadly I could've done without the latter. The sidebar is a pane (get it: it's a pain, but it's a side pane... nvm) but it goes away with one click. A very Edge-alike feature is that new tabs present the user with a pleasant scene on each newly opened tab, making it pleasant to use.
3. Resource consumption: x/10
This is hard to measure so early on, given it's and Appimage and given Firefox had more extras installed, but I will give this a proper bench when time permits. I will say that with 10 tabs open (including this one), running in Mint22 Cinnamon, in a VM, it's still very responsive, so I'd like to think it's either that the team stripped away all Firefox's bloat, or there's pretty good resource management added. Maybe both.
4. Effective performance. 9/10. Render times on pages are faster despite using Web Kit. Older site which can take seconds -- yes plural -- are rendered immediately with their HTML elements and we can watch them styled with CSS and positioned in realtime. And that's how it should be as opposed to spinning wait cursors, dots, and simply blank canvases. Input fields have no lag on backspace, and if anything, it's too responsive here. I'm so used to the ~250-500ms delay in other browsers, I've deleted entire lines twice writing this review. Scrolling is fast, and smooth. Animations are great, too.
5. Compatibility: 9/10
This here browser seems 100% compatible with Firefox. With access to all FF's plugins as well as profiles, Midori makes the transition for Firefox refugees as easy as a frsh Firefox install. Most of the UI internally matches FF, while ensuring that externally, it still presents that cleaner UI.
6. Trust/privacy rating: 7/10
My primary reason is that it's no longer in the Debian repos (last in Bullseye). I'm not sure why, but as someone wary of third-party software, I need to keep testing it in a VM for now. My second gripe is that Astian is the default search engine and there's quite a lot of product placement on the side panel. Maybe I've become too paranoid over the years, and based on if I find any telemetry, or if there are some extra privacy features, this rating may go up or down.
7. Functionality: 10/10
Yes, it works. No glitching, no scrolling issues, no rendering problems, and no freezes under load. So far it can display every site I've tried it on, from online shopping to the media-heavy stuff.
Final verdict: While I have no intention of moving from Firefox yet, Midori is most definitely the future, especially for Firefox users, even more so fo Linux users. It's also likely to be the last browser that Google hasn't tainted based on their current model (obviously all verdicts from the DoJ still pending). So whether you love it or hate it (and IDK why you'd hate it), it's going to make a serious impact. I suggest distros that did deprecate it revisit this browser as I have. It's come a long, long way, and it's going to make a big splash by Q4 2025 at the latest. This is one of those projects that leaps up and sucker punches you! In the longer term, I see it gaining serious traction, splitting the Firefox user base by at least 20% initially, but possibly more, based on Mozilla's actions. As for Chromium users who're Firefox ex-pats, I see this as their return ticket home from the Googlesphere. Oh yes, this browser is coming and headed for mainstream to succeed where others like Falkon have failed.
Of course, only time will tell, and the more I use it, the more praise or critiques I will have. For now, though, at a first ~20min glance, I think it's a wise idea to start preparing for the Midori Era because wave or tsunami, it's coming.
astian.org
