Orca browser with Gecko 1.9

Composer, ChatZilla and other Mozilla applications, along with Netscape, Galeon, K-Meleon and other products.
Post Reply
leuce
Posts: 23
Joined: July 18th, 2004, 11:42 am
Location: Johannesburg
Contact:

Orca browser with Gecko 1.9

Post by leuce »

G'day everyone

After checking out some of the latest available browsers, I discovered that Orca (a variant of Avant) uses Gecko 1.9 as its rendering engine. When I visit Firefox's extensions page, the page tells me that some extensions are not available for "Firefox 3.5.6", which is presumably the last version of Firefox that used Gecko 1.9.

My question is how can I find out what are the major differences between Orca (latest) and Firefox (latest, or version 4), based on the above information? What critical bugs exist in Gecko 1.9 that have since been fixed? What kinds of web sites or web apps simply won't work in Orca because of its use of Gecko 1.9?

Thanks
Samuel (leuce)

PS... I'm not considering moving over to Orca, but it is rare to see a FF clone instead of an IE clone.
User avatar
patrickjdempsey
Posts: 23686
Joined: October 23rd, 2008, 11:43 am
Location: Asheville NC
Contact:

Re: Orca browser with Gecko 1.9

Post by patrickjdempsey »

leuce wrote:My question is how can I find out what are the major differences between Orca (latest) and Firefox (latest, or version 4), based on the above information? What critical bugs exist in Gecko 1.9 that have since been fixed? What kinds of web sites or web apps simply won't work in Orca because of its use of Gecko 1.9?


Gecko 1.9 is Firefox 3.0... which was by far the slowest and buggiest major Firefox release I ever used with terribly memory leaks and constant crashes. Here's a list of all of the fixed security vulnerabilities since Firefox 3.5 was released:

http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-v ... fox35.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-v ... fox36.html
http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-v ... refox.html

The last update of Firefox 3.0 was synchronized with 3.5.9 in March of 2010, meaning Orca will lack everything after that... Looking closer, the name of the Orca install file is: "12.21.2009 1.2 build 6" which leads me to believe that last time Orca was updated was December of 2009, shortly after the release of Firefox 3.0.16, meaning it cannot possibly even contain all of the last 3 security patches for Firefox 3.0, let alone anything after that. In the last two years there have been some really major security exploits discovered out in the wild that newer versions of Firefox protect against... really not worth the risk IMO. I've never used Orca but I'm sure that there is nothing that it offers that isn't either included in Firefox 5.0 or you can't add with an extension. And considering that 3.0 was the SLOWEST release of Firefox I ever used... there is no way that the tweaks that Orca devs did to make it run a little faster than Firefox can compare to Firefox 5.0 which by all (rational) accounts is virtually indistinguishable from Chrome in terms of speed.
Tip of the day: If it has "toolbar" in the name, it's crap.
What my avatar is about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/sea-fox/
ChrisBzilla
Posts: 43
Joined: January 26th, 2012, 11:12 am
Location: U.S east coast.

Re: Orca browser with Gecko 1.9

Post by ChrisBzilla »

Orca is no longer supported.
http://www.orcabrowser.com/

I used Orca for a while for a secondary Alternative to Firefox 3 and flock for a while, years ago
but Orca was buggy and very few firefox extensions actually work.

Avant was a very handy browser in the early 2000's... it was built on I.E;s Trident and was streamline with many features like tabbed browsing, rendering buttons, and very fast. The Orca browser was an attempt to build the same fast elegant browser on Gecko.
Avant 2012, still uses the trident engine, but now renders in firefox gecko engine as well. unfortunately when I tested it on my Windows, the browser was slow to render pages in Firefox view, and very few firefox plugin actually work, correctly.

Supposedly The future Avant browsers will eventually render in three flavors, I.E., firefox, and Webkit. I hope it is marketable, because I still have a sentimental attachment to using on Windows 9x.
Post Reply