Testing Midori and Geary

Omygoodness,

Seamonkey has failed me for the last time. I figured this was bound to happen anyway, since the whole damn thing is built from Mozilla code. There are just some websites that refuse to load in Seamonkey that load instantly in other browsers. The mail interface is kinda dated and clunky. I don’t really mind that because it’s familiar to me and I’m used to it. But as a recommendation for others, wellll…. not so much.

Oh, guess what?! There’s actually such a thing as browsers that are not built from Edge, Firefox or Chromium! It seems like most people either don’t know that or they think they have to use something built on one or the other. It ain’t so, y’know.

So today, just for giggles and grins, I’m revisiting a couple of non-Mozilla and non-Chromium applications. The first is…. <drumrollllllll> …

The Midori web browser! A couple of years ago I test-drove this ultralight and simple browser and ended up hating it because it crashed randomly and frequently. It always “picked up where it left off,” but the random crashes were so frequent that Midori became unusable for more than a cursory glance at a web page. Now, however, even under heavy use for over an hour, Midori is nimble and quick as always, and free of whatever bug caused it to crash and burn without warning or provocation. The project is run by some private company now, no longer part of the Xfce Desktop project. But it’s still fully open-source and free, which I insist upon. If you’re using Debian and/or Ubuntu or variations of them, don’t bother with the .deb packaged version yet. It doesn’t work and it’s a known issue with the developers. It installs easily as a Flatpak in any Linux distribution, and it’s available for Windows as well. It doesn’t have all the features and add-ons and bloat of the popular browsers, except for the built-in ready-out-of-the-box ad-blocker, and it doesn’t have the “lemme hold you by the hand” kinda interface that slows other browsers down. It lacks documentation for now, but I suspect some good stuff is in the works now that the project is newly revived. Definitely worth a test drive!

The other app I have reviewed before and also really liked, even though the Geary e-mail client lacks a proper Address Book. It can collect email addresses and offer them in the ultralight but not-so-intuitive HTML-enabled mail composer. For the full-featured alternative for Linux, check out Evolution, which is a good and less bloated drop-in replacement for Thunderbird. I’m actually writing this blog post using Geary! It’s effortless, but again, it doesn’t offer the “lemme hold your hand” sort of interface that adds weight and bloat to most other popular email clients for Linux. If you’re an ElementaryOS user, Geary will already be mostly familiar to you, even without the changes eOS made to Geary when it was the default email app in that operating system.

Conscience-driven as I am about avoiding “woke” products even if they’re free, and with Seamonkey relying too much on woke Mozilla for it’s source code as well as hosting and marketing, I’m much more likely to adopt these two wonderful bits of software as my default apps.