In another recent thread I was taken to task by graeme_p for my dismissal of the Falkon web browser. I have decided to look closer at it. The following is my observations as a new Falkon user in a linux (manjaro XFCE) context. Please bear with the historic preamble: it is relevant.

Since Firefox was first released I used it extensively. Then it upset me by not allowing me some well-established add-ons, so I moved to Pale Moon, which I have used almost exclusively until a few months ago.

Pale Moon, when I first began using it, seemed a good replacement but after a while it dropped noscript, which I felt helped protect my browsing - I often look at a dozen or more sites a day looking for technical and other solutions and am not always certain the site is not compromised. Instead of noscript, I installed uBlock Origin, which seems to do much of what I want. I did discover, though, that it sometimes blocked certain actions from certain sites - I could not post to the Manjaro forum, for example, though I could read it. Not sure if this was uBlock or some remnant of noscript.

This was a problem which I surmounted by installing Waterfox. This seems to manage most of what I want and has both noscript and uBlock. It also allows the Tab-Mix add-on, which I find invaluable in making the browser easier to navigate. I use it as a "Can't use Pale Moon on this site" solution. This was the beginning of a trend away from Pale Moon and I've been running the odd copy of SeaMonkey, Basilisk and Brave for different projects. Over the past couple of months I've been trying out Vivaldi but it's a veritable resource hog, taking many processes and about 20% plus CPU WHEN IDLE. Because of it's fragmented nature it is difficult to determine the memory usage but it appears to total around 10%. In comparison, Pale Moon uses about 20% CPU when working but around 1% when idle and about 17% Memory.

So, what to lose? I have been running Falkon on a single, simple site for a couple of months, looking at the site only a dozen or so times but keeping it on the desktop. I have now begun to load it up with sites and pages to see what it will (and will not) do.

At first I opened a window for my log viewer and trap manager - total six pages from my own control site. Impression: it seems a lot faster than Pale Moon so I added by tranche of WebmasterWorld pages in a new window - 12 pinned pages plus five assorted SEs (I am writing this on Falkon). These two windows use a LOT fewer resources: 0.03% CPU idle (about 3% to 8% working) and 4% to 5% Memory - I'm assuming here that none of the other processes running are involved (exclusively) with Falkon. So, so far, impressed.

At the moment those two windows are all I have open in Falkon. The WebmasterWorld site places more requirements than my own control site, though, and the following is a summary of my observations as I enabled WebmasterWorld pages.

First, I had to enable javascript (none of my sites use it so it I had turned it off). This is where I miss noscript or uBlock or Defender (which I use on Vivaldi). I looked for a way of adding at least one of these into the extensions but could find no way of doing so. Whilst I am reasonably happy in allowing JS on WebmasterWorld there is no way I can accept that on a general site browser. There is a JS on/off extension in the Falkon store but it requires something called PyFalkon and has no installation instructions that I can find. I also suspect that if you turn it on it is on for all pages in all windows until turned off again. -- I've just found the StatusBar Icons extension (not enabled by default) and one of the buttons allows JS to be disabled/enabled per page; if this works ok I may live with the rest.

The linux default appearance is clunky - shame as it has a nice logo. I am currently running with the Mac theme; it's better but still unappealing. I will try the (only) Theme from the store later.

Obviously, no Tab-Mix so I can't colour the current tab to identify it; the default tab colours are too close to identify easily. The behaviour of the tabs in general is good, though. Certainly beter than Vivaldi.

When you hit Refresh on a POSTed page it refreshes without asking. Not always acceptable.

ToolTips on the Preferences panel would help - what is "Print element background" for example?

The Global User Agent option is good, though I must quibble about those offered - they are extremely out of date and selecting the Firefox UA, for example, would get the browser blocked at my sites. So the only option seems to be: specify your own UA in the Per Site box. Which one would then have to keep up to date, but there you go.

That's about it for a couple of hours use. If a Falkon user (graeme_p ?) would like to put me straight on the above, please do so. I'm going to run it for at least a few days to see what happens.