When comparing Midori vs Photon, the Slant community recommends Midori for most people. In the question“What are the best Android web browsers?” Midori is ranked 7th while Photon is ranked 26th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro True desktop browser experience
In flash mode you get remote access to desktop Firefox on a Linux server. Unbeatable desktop web compatibility on Android.
Cons
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.
Con Videos are compressed twice
In Flash mode, you get an interactive streaming video of a desktop browser running on their server, but this means that when you watch videos (a major use case for Flash mode), which are already compressed, it has to be lossy compressed again to get to you, with noticeable loss of quality. So it's better to watch videos with Flash mode off if you can. There's also a bit of lag when scrolling and such.
Con Flash mode has ads
You can also get an annual subscription to turn these off, but it's $10/year. That's kind of pricey when you can get Puffin Browser Pro with unlimited service for a single payment of $4.
