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Comparing Epiphany and Midori on the Raspberry Pi
By Derek | September 7, 2014
I wanted to play around with the Raspberry Pi again, and what better opportunity than the release of a new browser choice? Since I’ve used the rPi, there’s really only been one good choice for a browser, and that’s Midori.
I took the opportunity to run some benchmarks on both browsers, as I hadn’t seen any published elsewhere.
Configuration
- Raspberry Pi Model B Not overclocked.
- Running Raspbian Wheezy, with LXDE.
- Using Wireless Adapter US Robotics MAXg USB, and wpa_supplicant.
- Connected via HDMI to 1080p display.
Method
- Installed Epiphany using instructions here.
- Rebooted after installing Epiphany.
- Rebooted after each test, to ensure a fresh environment.
- Each browser was fullscreen during its tests.
- Benchmarks used
- BrowserMark http://browsermark.rightware.com/
- PeaceKeeper http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/
- SunSpider https://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html
Benchmarks
BrowserMark 2.1 — using US Server
- Midori: OS detected as Mac OS X 1, Browser detected as Midori 0.4, Engine detected as WebKit 535
- Epiphany: OS detected as Mac OS X 1, Browser detected as Safari 6.0, Engine detected as WebKit 538
I was very surprised that Midori wasn’t able to run this test at all.
PeaceKeeper — 2014 Sept. 5th
- Midori: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/535+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/535.22+ Midori/0.4
- Epiphany: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh, ARM Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/538.15 Version/6.0 Debian/7.6 (3.8.2.0-0rpi14rpi1) Epiphany/3.8.2
In the PeaceKeeper test, Epiphany is nearly twice as fast.
SunSpider — 1.0.2
- Midori
- Epiphany
You can download the SunSpider full results here.
Findings
As you can see, the newly released Epiphany browser is much quicker at displaying and rendering content, as well as being a much more capable browser. In the PeaceKeeper tests, twice as fast, and in the SunSpider tests, easily three times faster.
However, during my time actually using the browser, I can see that it’s got a long way to go. As an example, I first attempted to make notes of my test results using Evernote. The site was completely unusable, in Epiphany.
I also didn’t include it in the graphs, but here are the results for my iPhone 5s, just for comparison:
- BrowserMark 2.1: Interestingly, I could get neither Safari nor Chrome to complete this test. Epiphany did, though.
- PeaceKeeper
- Safari: 1773
- Chrome: 1087
- SunSpider 1.0.2
- Safari: 417.3 ms
- Chrome: Test appeared to run, but did not return results.
Tested while connected to WiFi, with all my normal stuff running. This comparison only benchmark is not meant to be scientific.
This alone makes it clear that for modern sites, the Raspberry Pi still has a way to go, even if you are very patient.
The good news is that the Raspberry Pi is still great for lots of things, just that browsing the modern web isn’t really one of them.
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