14 DAY TRIAL // Raspberry Pi is powered by a wealth of operating systems, but there is also an official one called Raspbian, which is based on Debian, as the name implies. The developers have now released a new web browser that should be much faster.
The Raspbian default browser was Midori and users know that it's not the fastest available right now. It's not a problem with the software, but it's not optimized to run on that platform. Collabora has been working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to release a new web browser that should prove to be much better.
"Since the first beta release we have made huge improvements; now the browser is more responsive, it's faster, and videos work much better (the first beta could play 640×360 videos at 0.5fps, now we can play 25fps 1280×720 videos smoothly). Some web sites are still a bit slow (if they are heavy on the JavaScript side), but there's not much we can do for web sites that, even on my laptop with an Intel Core i7, use 100% of one of the cores for more than ten seconds!" say the devs in a blog entry.
The browser is based on Epiphany, which is part of the GNOME project. The end result of this collaboration is that the web browser comes with a more responsive UI, progressive tiled rendering, faster startup time (up to three times), better YouTube support, hardware decoding and scaling of videos, and much more Memory and CPU friendly tab management.
All you have to do in order to get this new browser is to enter the following commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser
[YOUTUBE=http://youtube.com/watch?v=6irAa6sZSsU]