ID:99785
 
Keywords: browser, lunascape
I'm not entirely certain how long Lunascape has been around, or why it hasn't made a bigger splash in the browser market, but I'm pretty damned glad I stumbled upon it via a blog "top ten" list.

Lunascape employs all three engines -- Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox), and Webkit (Chrome) for those unaware -- and can swap them with the click of a button, which means I was finally able to get rid of Chrome and ignore Internet Exploder again. It's also speedy as hell. Regardless of the rendering engine you're using, Lunascape renders pages faster than Opera did on my machine, so I uninstalled that as well.

So what doesn't it do? I was expecting it to use one cache/cookie file for the entire program instead of one for each engine, but was disappointed. This means you have to, for example, login once for each of the three engines to test a website. In addition, any plugins for any one of the engines only works for that engine, as can be expected. Installing Firefox's AdBlock on Gecko won't help you on Trident or Webkit rendered pages.

Lunascape is essentially a browser built on the concept of Firefox's IETab with the Webkit engine included, but it's still a lot more convenient than having all three browsers on your machine. In addition, its memory usage is a fraction of Firefox's when using the Gecko engine, meaning Lunascape has a much more efficient implementation of Gecko while still allowing you to use all of Firefox's plugins.

You don't sacrifice anything switching from Firefox to Lunascape, as I know I found myself right at home with almost zero adjustment time.
So does it run Runescape better or not?
Thanks for introducing this new browser to me. It seems to be working faster then my Firefox. Youtube videos do not seem to load while playing any longer! Which is great for my suckish internet connection. Thank you.
Nice browser, but just not my type, have used firefox too much and can't stand to face the small differences Lunascape has to offer.
Can you customize the look at all? One reason I like Chrome is because it has so little else to display other than the website display itself. Opera too in that you can pretty much get the same look as Chrome.
Fugsnarf wrote:
Can you customize the look at all? One reason I like Chrome is because it has so little else to display other than the website display itself. Opera too in that you can pretty much get the same look as Chrome.

They give 3 options, the ORION one is the best IMO.

But they offer:

ORION
Standard
Cool

I'm not too sure about downloading custom "looks" or "skins" for it as yet, I'm having fun with Lunascape though, great browser, I must say.
Lunascape looks promising but I love my Firefox so, so much. While the idea of it being compatible with my current addons is appealing I won't be installing it anytime soon.
I am using it right now. Nice find, I like that it even imported my add-ons. I had Glasser on Firefox, and it appears to not be compatable. Oh well, no more transparency for me. I also like that typing in the address bar defaults to open into a new tab, and you can view all your tabs in a cascaded view- while each tab could be running a different engine.
@ Qubic. Duelmaster409:
The difference between Lunascape's Gecko implementation and Firefox's are so minimal that most people probably wouldn't even notice -- I certainly didn't!

@Fugsnarf:
You can entirely customize the toolbar area with a style similar to OpenOffice. Any standard or menu command can be added to a toolbar on the browser chrome. You can't achieve a Chrome-ish look from what I see, but I haven't tried any of the skins for it.
Well I've noticed that Lunscape's Gecko implementation is a lot better compared to Firefox, main reason is the increase in speed, which I've tested myself... also, from what I've heard, Lunascape handles memory allocation a lot better than Firefox? Is that true?
@Haywire:
I believe so -- I've seen it kind of hop all over the place since I got it. It was using 40 megs on the forum, 117 megs by the time I got here (with about a dozen pages between), but it tanked to 68 megs while I was watching it. It seems to be doing a better job of cleaning up the stuff it's stashing in my RAM than Firefox does.