This is a list of frequently asked questions about the Midori Web Browser. Anyone feel free to improve and/ or extend this page, but keep it clean and easy to read for other Xfce users.

Midori is a Web Browser, that aims to be lightweight and fast. It aligns well with the Xfce philosophy of making the most out of available resources.

Pronounce it “midoɺi”, with a Bavarian/ Japanese “r” or “Mee-Doh-Ree” in English or read it Italian. The name comes from the Japanese word 緑 (みどり) for the colour “green”.

The paw of a green cat. Obviously. Also it resembles the letter “M” in “Midori”. The curving is supposed to emphasize speed.

Midori is basically very portable and should run on all platforms that its dependencies support.

Midori and all delivered artwork are licensed under the LGPL2.

The set of themed icons Midori can use is very limited. For instance icons for a new tab or the throbber are not guaranteed to be available. To fix this, install a Freedesktop.org spec compliant icon theme, such as Tango or Gnome, or one that is compatible with these.

If you don't have a desktop application that takes care of Gtk settings or if your interface doesn't support a particular feature, you can modify any settings easily manually by specifying them in a text file called ~/.gtkrc-2.0 or /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:

Use Tango as a fallback for your icon theme:

gtk-icon-theme = "MySuperFancyTheme"
gtk-fallback-icon-theme = "Tango"

Use a smaller toolbar:

gtk-toolbar-icon-size = GTK_ICON_SIZE_SMALL_TOOLBAR

Enable changing hotkeys while hovering menu items:

gtk-can-change-accels = 1

There appears to be an issue with Glib 2.16. The recommended solution is to upgrade your Glib package to 2.18.

You need to set MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH, for example like this:

export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH="/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins:/opt/mozilla/lib/plugins"

You can either run that above line and run Midori in the same terminal afterwards or, for the long term, put it in ~/.bash_profile or /etc/profile.d or your respective distribution's place for this.

That's a problem with WebKit. You can work around it to some extent if you start Midori like so:

export WEBKIT_IGNORE_SSL_ERRORS="1" midori

Midori can start downloads with an external download manager. To use that feature, open up the Preferences and insert the name of a program executable in the Download Manager executable. There is a list of download managers on Wikipedia.

GGet is a download manager primarily for the GNOME desktop, but it also works in other unix/ GTk+ environments.

A simple shell script that uses wget to download the files and informs the user with a notification when the downloads are complete.

You need a notification daemon, usually you already have the one from GNOME, but there is also notification-daemon-xfce and xfce4-notifyd (only in git).

#!/bin/sh
 
test -z "$1" && exit 1
 
if [ -f ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs ]; then
    . ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs
fi
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR=${XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR:-~/downloads}
 
notify-send -t 1500 -u low -i gtk-save Midori\ Download "Download started...
$*"
wget "$*" -P $XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR || exit 2
notify-send -u low -i gtk-save Midori\ Download "The download is complete.
<a href=\"file://$XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR\">$XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR</a>"

By running a local proxy you can modify web content even before it has reached Midori. That allows you to do things similar to what user scripts and user styles provide and even others that neither is suitable for.

To use Midori with a proxy server, there are two options:

1. WebKit is built with libcurl. Define an environment variable http_proxy and set it to your proxy server like so:

export http_proxy = 234.22.154.11:8000

2. WebKit is built with libsoup. Midori >= 0.1.2, is built with libsoup. Try to open some web page. Now open the preferences, and you should see a Network tab with a 'Proxy server' field.

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with filter capabilites and particular support for blocking advertisements before even loading them.

http://www.privoxy.org/faq/

Mousehole is a scriptable proxy server written in Ruby.

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/mouseHole/

Midori has an extension that implements Mouse Gestures now. It is only available in the repository and won't work with a copy older than 2009-01-21.

For a quick and dirty overview of the gestures in the current release take a look at the preliminary manual. Further information is available at the MGX website.

Additionally, there are programs allowing mouse gestures system-wide, for example EasyStroke.

Search engines are tools to ease searches on different web sites. In order to search something with a website, that site must provide a search feature available with a web form. In this example, we will setup a search engine for the English Wikipedia.

The search form of the Wikipedia web site is available in the left column. Just enter your search terms (for example “Midori browser”) and validate. You're then directed to a result page. You can see its address in the location bar. It is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Midori+browser&go=Go. Notice that your search terms are present in the result page address.

Now, open the Search Engine Manager

Here it is

If you validate the Add button, you are presented an interface to enter different parameters. Choose a name and a description. Then enter a search URL. That is your previous search URL with your search term replaced with %s. When searching something with that search engine, Midori will use the search URL, replace %s with your search terms, and bring you to computed URL. We don't care about the icon yet. A token can be used as a shorthand for a keyboard search. It's therefore important to use an easy to remember token. For example, we use “wp” for the Wikipepdia. More to come about tokens latter.

Now, your search engine is created.

You can check its presence in the Midori search bar

Now, you can use it by typing your search term in the location bar. If you search for “Midori browser”, you should be redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Midori+browser&go=Go. Since we assigned the token “wp” to our search engine, you can also access the result page by typing “wp Midori browser” in the location bar.

Tip: You can go through the this tutorial and replace all instances of “en.” in “en.wikipedia.org” with “fr.” or any other Wikipedia country code and you will have your Wikipedia search in your favourite language.

UserScripts are scripts applied on some, or on all web pages. They can modify pages locally to add or alter functionality. That includes fixing bugs in web pages. User scripts are also available in other browsers, in the form of Mozilla's Greasemonkey or Opera's User JavaScript.

Midori's support for user scripts aims to be compatible with Greasemonkey to a good extent. Midori supports Greasemonkey's @include and @exclude metadata. So user scripts have a way to define on which pages they will be executed. Midori does not support advanced metadata, such as @require and @resource, so user scripts cannot define dependencies on other scripts. Midori also does not support greasemonkey's api. Be aware that scripts must be compatible with Webkit. A Greasemonkey script that makes use of functionality specific to Gecko will not work in Midori.

First, you need to find some scripts (or write your own). You can find some at userscripts.org. As explained previously, a lot of scripts work, while others do not work.

To install a userscript, you have to download the script as a file, and put it in the folder ~/.local/share/midori/scripts (you may need to create that folder if it does not exist). Midori will automatically see and use it, which you can also see in the user scripts panel.

Note, if the script is only shown as source code on the page, you first have to create a new text file in a text editor, copy the source code into the new file, and save it as my-user-script.user.js where “.user.js” is the extension.

You can use BlockFlash2 as a user script to hide Flash elements with a —“clickable orange line” lol, please, find a better sentence— and load/stop them on a single click

You can also use FlashBlock WannaBe as a user script in order to replace Flash elements with placeholders and load them on click. The script is pretty advanced compared to most Flash blockers found on the web.

User styles are CSS Cascading Style sheets that are loaded locally and applied on top of web pages, similar to User scripts, in order to add or alter functionality and also fix bugs.

First, you need to find some styles (or write your own). You can find some at userstyles.org. Many styles may or may not work, depending on whether the author decided to use browser specific features.

To install a user style, you have to download the style as a file, and put it in the folder ~/.local/share/midori/styles (you may need to create that folder if it does not exist). Midori will automatically see and use it, which you can also see in the user styles panel.

Note, if the style is only shown as source code on the page, you first have to create a new text file in a text editor, copy the source code into the new file, and save it as my-user-style.user.css where “.user.css” is the extension.

Open up the Preferences and use the file chooser button beside User Stylesheet to choose a style sheet file. The style sheet will from now on be applied to all sites automatically.

You can use Ad Blocking FiltersetP as a style sheet in order to remove advertisings from web sites.

If you find a bug in Midori, the first step to have it fixed is to report it to Midori's bug tracker. You will improve chances to have the bug fixed if you report it effectively. So here are some tips to make you report useful.

Midori is based on the WebKitGtk rendering engine. This means the process of displaying web content on a page is done mainly by the WebKit library. If your bug involves the user interface of Midori (buttons, menu, addressbar, behavior and so on) it's definitely a bug in Midori. If your bug involves a crash when visiting a specific website, or a page displaying improperly, this could be a WebKit problem.

So, before opening a bug report in Midori's bugtracker, please check if the problem comes from the WebKit side or on midori side. Webkit provides a minimal browser named GtkLauncher. If you use your Linux distribution package, GtkLauncher is in likely in your WebKit package. If you have compiled WebKit yourself, GtkLauncher should be in the Programs/ directory.

So, launch GtkLauncher and open the problematic website. If the problem occurs in GtkLauncher, you've probably encountered a bug in WebKit itself. So it is more likely to be fixed if you report it in the bug tracker of WebKit. If the problem appears in Midori but not in GtkLauncher, you've probably encountered a Midori problem; report it in the bug tracker of Midori.