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[mavrothal]

Today I stumbled on this post that reminded it me the Surf activity that I had come across on rawhide-xo back in March, so I gave it another try under Sugar 8.2.x.
Surf is a WebKit-based browser (like Apple's Safari) and has an interface identical to Browse activity which is Gecko-based (like Firefox). One thing is immediately evident: this thing is FAST!!! In arbitrary page rendering tests is at least twice as fast as Browse-102 and Firefox-6 activities and faster than Opera. It also gets a 100/100 acid3 test (though it fails the test-no smooth animation).
The bad news: No tubs, no bookmarks (even as a "keep" page), no activity installation (does not know what to do the .xo files), no consistent font scaling (depending on the page). I do not know how many of these are real and how many are due to my os787/802 hybrid (!?) system and my (updated) 2.11.0 geode video driver, but the speed difference worths it.
So give it a try and provide some feedback that may motivate the developer to take another look at it (since there is no apparent development for at least 5 months now...)

To install under os767/802 first install the required dependencies. In terminal type

Code:

su
yum install pywebkitgtk WebKit-gtk gnome-python2-gconf

and then download and install the activity using Browse from here http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/surf/Surf-106.xo

[ChristophD]

Yeah, Bryan Berry pointed Surf out to me yesterday and so I'm installing the required dependencies as we speak to give the thing a shot.

Will report my findings in a bit.

[ChristophD]

Okay, the speed difference really is noticable and quite a nice improvement over other browsing solutions on the XO. The real killer feature for me though is HTML 5 support even though that one still seems a little unstable as for example the Mozilla Open Web Tools Directory (http://tools.mozilla.com/) seems to crash "Surf".

The default font size seems to be set a little to high but that's easy to change.

And as mavrothal already said above especially tabbed browing but also bookmarks would be great additions to make this an even better solution.

All in all definitely worth a look!

[kimtoufectis]

Installed as described, and it's as fast as one could hope for on an xo.  Like its Browse activity cousin, the interface lacks typical features such as support for tabs, and it handles bookmarks only within a session.  Still, a very useable tool, until...

The problem for me is it seems to fail when asked to handle flash content, which includes most of the online places I visit (for webmail, music streaming, and RSS among others).  I followed instructions to replace Gnash with Flash for Firefox and Browse, but haven't the skills to figure out how to do this for Surf on my own.

A pity, as I like the simplicity of Sugar on the xo rather than introducing another operating system mainly to browse the web at speed.