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Just when you thought we had enough web browsers available another goes and pops up right under our noses. That’s exactly what the Japanese browser called Sleipnir did, and it’s managed to scrounge up 9% of the browser market share in Japan.
What’s so special about Sleipnir? It reminds me a lot of Maxthon and Avant Browser in what it has set out to accomplish. Basically it uses Internet Explorer’s rendering engine (called Trident) to display sites, but the browser itself is customizable with the use of plug-ins and skins. One of the biggest benefits of using this over the other IE-based browsers is that it can also use Firefox’s rendering engine (called Gecko) to display sites. This is something that Maxthon used to offer, but it was abandoned when Maxthon 2 was released.
The best thing Sleipnir has going for it is how efficiently it manages its memory. When running it the memory usage starts at about 34MB, and will gradually increase as you open more tabs. No matter how many tabs I opened and closed the memory usage would always fall back to 34MB when I had no websites open. If I let it sit there idle for a few minutes it would even fall as low as 28MB. That’s among the best memory usage I’ve seen for any graphical web browser.
I don’t think I’ll be switching to Sleipnir anytime soon, but it’s nice to see alternatives like this. The browser arena is getting a little crowded though.
Note: A portable version of Sleipnir is available.
Sleipnir Homepage [via InfoWorld]
Maxthon 2 has more or less the same memory footprint.
I will download Sleipnir now and have a go, thanks for letting us know about it!
Maxthon 2 seemed to hover around in the 40-50MB range for me. It’s not a huge difference, but Sleipnir does take the crown in terms of performance (on my computer at least).
With an interface that mimics IE 6, they’re not gonna make it. Besides, most sites are compatible with the Gecko engine so why would you want the IE engine then? (DON’T say Windows Update. That runs in the background nowadays.)
Let us not be sectarian nor defeatist. Sleipnir, be welcomed among the browser enthusiasts! — This said, I’ve just downloaded it and will give it a try, after their website (and Cybernet just before) has triggered my curiosity!
OK, I have been using it for a few hours now…
Strangely enough Ryan, on my PC Maxthon uses around 30MB RAM, while Sleipnir around 60MBs. However, I have to say that I have installed 3-4 plugins on both.
Sleipnir’s options panel is a bit confusing. Maxthon and Avant, on the other hand, have a more simplified interface plus many more features. I couldn’t find any options for blocking Ads (like the Adblock feature in Maxthon) but I guess you can install an existing script just like in Opera.
The only reason I would use Sleipnir over Firefox would be because of the low system resources it uses. I’d use it over Maxthon because of the Gecko engine. However, at this point Sleipnir has less features than both browsers, thus I’ll stick with those.
Having said that, Opera seems to combine all the good features of Firefox, Maxthon and Sleipnir, without any drawbacks (apart from some sites not rendering properly), so Opera is at the moment my fav browser.
It really depends on what country you’re in. I think it’s Russia or something who’s developers never really test with Firefox, and so a lot of sites don’t even work with it.
I’ve actually been wondering lately if Opera should just switch over to the Gecko rendering engine. They can then work with Mozilla to make it better, and then everyone really wins. I think that would please a lot of the Opera users, and it would definitely fix a lot of the rendering problems the browser has.
I know that a lot of readers will laugh at what I am about to state, but it really irks me to no end that mostly all of these supposed IE shell “replacement” browsers repeatedly fail to offer cut, copy, and paste buttons to place on the toolbar. Yes, I am well aware of being able to copy & paste via right-click commands, but I don’t always like to do that. It is much faster for me to simply click on the button for each of those commands, so I am curious if Ryan can tell me why these new browser developers omit such basic funtion as cut, copy & paste buttons? Some of us still like having those buttons in our toolbars.
I made a typo – function (instead of funtion) and forgot to mention that I also know how to use keyboard commands as well to cut, copy or paste, but again, I do not prefer to do that all of the time. Bring back these buttons!!
That’s something I never really thought about. Personally I always use the keyboard commands, and I’ve never been one to use toolbar buttons for these sort of things. I’d have to imagine that the developers would add these buttons if they were requested though.
There’s only one reason why I don’t like IE – the piece of crap that they have the nerve to call a rendering engine. Web standards mean nothing to the devs of IE (yes IE 8 was meant to be the holy grail but so far my pages look worse in IE 8 than they do in IE 6, despite looking perfect in Firefox 2/3, Opera 9+ and Safari) and the fact that someone would think using that engine is a good idea makes me doubt their product.
They’ve made a browser that can run two rendering engines, one of which is Gecko, and has extensions. Am I missing something or did they just invent Firefox 2?
Hmmm, from the maker of FeedDemon I’ve understood that the Gecko plugin has not been developed for a long time anymore, which made me wary of this great feature Sleipnir seems to have: Gecko rendering. I couldn’t find the version of the Gecko engine used on Sleipnir’s site, but I did find this post about an error message regarding it:
[ogasawalrus.com]
If you look at the error message, you see that the plugin is using Gecko 20051003, i.e. a version of the rendering engine released early October 2005!!! That version will likely have many bugs and perhaps even security problems.
In other words: this is just another shell for the IE Trident engine, anyone should forget about the Gecko option.
Yikes! I didn’t realize that was the case at all. That would be terrible if it’s using a version of Gecko that is that old.