A handful of popular Internet browsers make up more than 99% of the browser market share. When you look on the Internet you find lots of articles about Firefox, Internet Explorer and to a lesser extent about Opera, Google Chrome and Safari. QtWeb Internet Browser is an alternative portable Open Source web browser based on Nokia's Qt framework and Apple's WebKit rendering engine. While it does not come with many features that you cannot find in another web browser it might still be worth a closer look. The browser has an extremely low resource usage of about 15-20 Megabytes with one open tab which is easily tripled or even quadrupled by most popular web browsers. If you minimize the browser the memory usage goes down to less than 1.5 Megabytes. The virtual memory size on the other hand is about 20-30 Megabytes lower than that of browsers like Firefox.

QtWeb Internet Browser comes with most features that you would expect from a web browser and some unique ones. It comes with a set of application styles that render the look and feel of the web browser and websites on the fly to simulate a Unix or Windows environment. Another interesting option is to move toolbars around including the possibility to place them outside of the browser window.

The web browser comes with a privacy mode and the unique feature to reset the browser settings to their default values on shutdown.

The rendering engine is pretty fast and scores a good 100 points out of 100 in the Acid3 test. There were not any compatibility problems while testing the browser and it might make an excellent alternative browser. The only downside is that it is currently only available for computers running Windows. The developers have published a comparison chart that is comparing their web browser with the other popular browsers.

Martin Brinkmann

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What's new in version 2.0 (released Mar 23, 2009):