When comparing w3m vs Midori, the Slant community recommends Midori for most people. In the question“What are the best web browsers for UNIX-like systems?” Midori is ranked 22nd while w3m is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Midori is:
Midori is considerably fast. It starts up in no time and renders pages as fast as many other more well-known browsers.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Support for several elements not found in terminal browsers
Although w3m is primarily a text-based web browser which runs inside the terminal, it supports and renders several elements which other terminal-based browsers cannot like images, tables, tabs or frames.
Pro Available as emacs plugin
W3m can also be downloaded as an emacs plugins to be used as a fast web browser that runs inside emacs.
Pro Very fast
Midori is considerably fast. It starts up in no time and renders pages as fast as many other more well-known browsers.
Pro Lightweight
Incredibly lightweight with very little memory consumption.
Pro Allows using webapps as if they were desktop apps
Midori has a built-in functionality with which you can create web apps that can be launched from the desktop. For example, you can create a web app for the desktop to launch Gmail or YouTube or any other web app that you use.
Pro Available on several distributions
Midori is used as a default choice for a web browser for some distributions (like Elementary OS) and it's available for easy downloading for many other distros through their official repositories.
Pro Useful plugins are built-in
Some very popular and useful plugins are built-in and available out of the box. For example, there's an RSS feed reader plugin and an Adblocker built-in.
Cons
Con Steep learning curve
Being a terminal web browser w3m has a certain learning curve because you need to learn the keystrokes and different commands.
Con Development stalled
There have been no recent updates. Lags other browsers in supporting modern web standards. Many distributions have replaced it with other browsers.
Con Abandonned
Con Misbehaves with Google Web Apps
On some distributions Midori may not work very well for Google Web Apps. On openSUSE for example, Midori starts misbehaving when you are going through Google Drive's folder hierarchy.
Con Supports insecure cipher suites
This browser supports RC4 encryption which is known to be insecure compared to other encryptions such as AES.
Con Another bloatware as Firefox
It is described as a lightweight browser but it is just a bloatware. It crashes sometimes. It is a clone of Firefox which is said to be a RAM-eater.
Con Unfamiliar UI
The UI can take a little to getting used to because it's not very conventional or similar to other browsers. For example, it uses a trashcan icon to view recently visited links.
