Arora was started as a demo application to test the QtWebkit functionality in 2008. Now it has evolved to an almost feature complete web browser. I have been using this browser in Fedora for some time along with both Firefox and Opera. I have not yet installed Google Chrome because for my 64bit Fedora 11 box it’s difficult to build a native x86_64 version of Chrome. So my Webkit experience has primarily been on Arora web browser and I’m really impressed with its performance.
Recently I ran a Google V8 benchmark on firefox, opera and Arora running on my Fedora 11 X86_64 box and here are the overall scores.
V8 Benchmark Suite – version 5
Firefox 3.51 score:209
Opera 10.00 Beta 2 Build 4520 (gcc4, shared qt4) score: 169
Arora 0.8.0 (shared qt4) score: 548
Even though these results alone cannot be used to judge the speed of each browser, Arora is indeed fast. In the long run what I felt was both Arora and Opera is significantly faster than Firefox.
If you want to install Arora for Fedora 11 I’ve packaged a x86_64 rpm. As usual first install Wellassa Linux repo if you have not already done so and issue:
“sudo yum install arora”
picture : Arora running V8 benchmark