Fastest browser to run over a forwarded X11 session [closed]

There are a few browsers that run a bit (to much) better over X11 forwarding.

Midori is a lightweight, tabbed browser that should run well.

Xlinks2 should work over X11 forwarding pretty well as well.

uzbl and surf are both browsers I've used that should work well over X11 because they're very minimal.

Even if you use a browser that is light-weight on CPU and RAM on the server, in this case the limiting factor will undeniably [1] be the network. What you want to avoid is mostly unnecessary screen rendering.

• Turn off "smooth scrolling" and such features. Use PgUp/PgDn instead of continuously scrolling if you have the choice (a single screen update is much faster than 30 just to see a full page).
• Keep a small browsing window (but not so small so you have to scroll a lot more as per previous point).
• Block animated material (animated GIFs are not that common nowadays, so blocking flash will probably do fine).
• Consider using VNC, which will compress the image transfer in a clever way. This gives me a much snappier experience when forced to use GUI over slow connections.
• Don't underestimate text-based browsers if there is something you quickly need to do on the server.
• Proxy and/or port tunneling through SSH avoid/s the problem completely. You just want to transfer the information, it is unnecessary to transfer the complete presentation layer.

[1]: Unless you have a very fast connection (~100Mbps in my experience); then any browser will probably do without being more annoying than using the browser locally. I am blessed with this in my remote needs.

The main reason X11forwarding is showing lag is because of the cipher that you are using to connect with, and not the actual browser itself.

You will find much better performance if you change the encryption to arcfour or blowfish.

I had the same issue, and found that this pretty much eliminated all of the lag. The downside is that these ciphers are not as secure as AES which is the typical default.

If you are on a windows machine using putty, you can change the encryption cipher selection policy under Connection/SSH/ . You should also enable compression on that same screen and save it as the default for the connection you are loading.

If you are connecting from one linux machine to the other, the connect string looks like this: ssh -XC4c arcfour,blowfish-cbc hostnameorip

I've found that running a VPN (server) on the remote machine and then connecting to that VPN remotely using your local machine and locally running browser allows you to have access to the remote IP space while still running the browser on your local machine. I use openvpn since it's easy and quick to setup.

Since only the HTTP traffic, rather than screen redraws, etc are forwarded it's just as fast as it would be if you were on the remote machine- minus the inefficiency of the encryption.

It's not quite the solution you asked about but while trying many lightweight browsers- xxxterm, etc and even resorting to lynx once in a while never worked out well. The VPN solution however, is more than serviceable even while tethering from your phone.

I was looking for a solution for this problem, and found a good one: Browsh works great for my purposes, though I don't need to get through any captchas that the low-fidelity graphics would make impossible to solve. Runs entirely in the terminal, though on the server side of things it uses Firefox to actually load the page before converting it to something renderable in a terminal.

Browsh