While I like Google Chrome, there are plenty of Webkit-based alternatives out there. One I enjoy using on my Crunchbang system is Midori – an efficient and highly customizable browser that made the jump to Windows just a couple months ago.

It’s important to note that Midori is still in the alpha stage – recently hitting 0.1.10 on Linux and the Windows binaries now on 0.1.8. If you’re after absolute stability, Midori might not be your thing. I experienced the occasional crash while playing with the interface, though it was plenty stable while surfing and utilizing web apps.

With the same six tabs open in Midori and Firefox 3.5.3 – including GMail and two javascript-heavy web apps – Midori used about 80Mb less memory, peaking at about 99Mb total. The browser doesn’t quite have Chrome’s rendering zippiness, but it’s still respectably fast.

So what else can Midori do? Apart from the expected features like tabbed browsing, and bookmark and history management it’s got support for Userscripts, Userstyles, the Netscape plugin architecture, and extensions. Search options can be customized as well and you can assign a token (i.e. preface with g to search with google).