Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Via Bapoumba’s blog, and in turn via Stemp’s blog, I took a swing at Midori last night (and then mentioned it in a post this morning without a proper screenshot … sigh 🙄 ).

Verdict? Impressive.

Very clean and comfortable appearance. Follows your GTK2 theme perfectly, and does an excellent job loading and rendering. This is the Arch version out of AUR, which takes forever to compile (it’s the Webgtkhtml or whatever svn version that ran for about an hour and half on this 1Ghz machine), but works nicely once it’s done.

I notice that a lot of the options (at least on my version) are grayed out, which either means the AUR package is somehow deficient, or those are still in the works. But otherwise it works great — handles cookies, etc., etc. … and speedwise falls somewhere around Kazehakase, probably a little quicker.

This is probably another one worth watching in the months to come, particularly since it seems to have an eye on usability. I can’t say when most of those grayed-out options will be available, but most of them are things you expect out of a heavier, fatter browser. If Midori ends up doing all those things without gaining 50 kilos, it will be a wonderful toy.