Trying out Midori and loving it

Firefox has been giving me hard times the last weeks with frequent lockups (albeit short ones) on Google Reader and screwups on YouTube (sound not playing, video garbled).

I've thought about Opera, but not too long. It's a good browser and all, but I was eager to try something new, something based on WebKit.

I searched for the available options and Midori came out on top since I only have GTK installed (and wasn't going to get Qt).

Midori is a GTK browser based on WebKit. I've been testing it these past couple of days and I must say, I'm growing quite fond of it.

It's fast and responsive, has a lot of great features and is quite simple to configure.

The sad thing is though, lots of sites have built-in checks to see if the browser you're using is capable of displaying their special feature correctly.

For example: I was surfing amazon.com and I wanted to take a look inside one of the books. I got redirected to a page that told me my browser wasn't capable of doing this. I realize these sites do this in order to ensure maximum compatibility for their users, but I really wanted to see if Midori could do this. So I switched the 'Identify as' to 'internet explorer', shuddered lightly and reloaded the page.

It worked perfectly. I'm probably going to set the 'report as' to Firefox as a default, just to keep it in the right circles.

Too bad this way Midori won't get the love it deserves in the browser stats.