I had walked away from Kazehakase after the version in the Feisty repositories, mostly because I was having trouble with form submissions (in other words, pressing the “Sign in” button on my Gmail login page). For some reason, the Feisty version kept sitting silent, without ever sending the login through.

Since I jumped back to Arch, I’ve been able to use the newest version — 0.4.7 — and it seems to be coming along nicely. That irritating form issue doesn’t seem to exist in the Arch version, and since it’s a cannonball compared to Firefox, I’ve picked it up as the only browser on my machine.

It still has some shortcomings. It still doesn’t have the option to clean up after itself — meaning it leaves an annoying folder full of cached images, stores the address bar history in the .kzrc file and won’t delete cookies on its own — but I’ve already invented a way around those things. And while it has a download tool, it’s rather primitive. And I’d like some more ways to control the tabs, such as which ones get focus and when. And the English wiki is a spam nightmare.

But I believe this to be a better solution for older machines, or anyone who is repulsed by Firefox’s bulk. I’d sooner use Arch than Ubuntu on a 300Mhz machine, and I’d sooner use Kazehakase than Firefox on the same PC.