ultra-lightweight browsers?

Eunos_Cosmo

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I'm running on a machine that you could say....is a classic, to put it nicely. I don't have much ram to work with and firefox 3.5 often runs at 60% or more of CPU. I've heard that FF has memory leaks and I've done the best I can to make it run better. I only have a couple of add-ons and things of that nature. The sad thing is that firefox, out of the big 3 or 4 (IE, Chrome, and Opera) seems to be the most lightweight...so I guess I'm asking if there is a fly-weight browser that is available? The lotus 7 if you will. Speed isn't really essential...just reliability and lower memory usage. Ideally, I wouldn't want memory usage to exceed 100k or so. FF often does this just idling.
 
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lol i meant 100m haha

I'm trying Midori right now...going to test that one afterwards
 
That link is dead. Using Midori...I loaded an extremely large image (8kpx x 7kpx) from google images. While rendering it, both FF and Midori were both around 100m but after it finished, Mozilla climbed to 130m and Midori dropped to a mere 37m...but its too bare bones to use every day I think.

Next up, opera.
 
You might have success with Opera. I hate the thing, but it does have a low footprint.
 
I'm surprised Chrome uses much memory.
 
Chrome creates a separate application for every tab open! :-O

Opera is something interesting.

I opened both FF and Opera and then opened the 3 youtube videos at the same time in both browsers. Opera had a noticeably higher memory usage, but it remained responsive. I could minimize it/maximize it, switch between tabs and the video was playing (relatively) smoothly in each of the Opera tabs. Firefox, on the other hand, was a mess. Took ages to bring up the window, the video was a slideshow and it took literally minutes to switch between tabs. I guess opera is just more efficient with it's memory usage?

edit: Opera was also quite a bit faster to load everything.
 
K-meleon seems to run very similar to Opera, but Opera looks better and seems to be more robust. In fact after letting them both idle for a few mins, K-meleon actually uses more memory.

Opera seems to be the winner.
 
Most of the new browsers sandbox tabs, I think (create separate processes for each tab) but it's done in such a way that the total memory footprint is not much, if at all, more than if all the tabs were in a single process - the reason for this is to help isolate problematic tabs if the browser crashes so the rest of the session isn't affected.

That said, it seems like Opera is the best browser for you - I too have it installed on a "classic" machine and have had no problems at all.
 
Actually the Lotus (Caterham) 7 is quite fast, so if you just care able lightweight, what you want is an Aygo. j/k

Pale Moon is a pretty light weight browser, it's based on Firefox but they have optimized the code for less memory usage.
http://www.palemoon.org/

I use Maxthon 1 on my single core laptop, it's based on IE7.
http://www.maxthon.com/download.htm
 
Would you consider a whole new OS?
My laptop used to perform very bad at playing HQ youtube movies, even at surfing the web without getting irritated.
I decided to give Ubuntu a try and it seems to use the resources much better then Windows did, it has everything you could possibly need on a classic machine and uses firefox.
I'm saying this because after using Opera for a while I ran into several websites and application not supporting it, that's not always Opera's fault but it is annoying.
Just letting you know ;)
 
I loaded an extremely large image (8kpx x 7kpx) from google images. While rendering it, both FF and Midori were both around 100m but after it finished, Mozilla climbed to 130m
Well, keep in mind that the browser has to decompress that 6000px * 7000px image and store it in memory to display. Let's do the calculation: 6,000px * 7,000px = 42,000,000px. Each pixel takes 4 bytes to store in ram (8bits per color, r g b and alpha = 24bit, 8bits per byte = 4 bytes), so that's 42,000,000 * 4 = 168,000,000 bytes. Converted to megabytes (or mebibyte if you want to be pedantic) it's ~ 160.2 (MiB). Even assuming only rgb (no alpha), you're still looking at 120 MiB for just that image. If your program isn't using at least that much, it's either hiding the image away in some other process or not loading the whole thing at a time (the later might be a distinct advantage for you). Modern desktop browsers are not designed to conserve memory -- quite the opposite -- they are designed to cache anything you might possibly need later in ram to speed things up. You might do better for something designed for ultra-portable systems or an older browser.


I'm surprised Chrome uses much memory.
Chrome creates a separate application for every tab open! :-O
It's true that Chrome forks a new process for each tab, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's using more memory. In fact, it is notoriously difficult to accurately track the memory usage of multithreaded/multi-process programs, because they commonly make use of CoW (Copy-on-Write, which basically means not actually making a copy of a block of memory that a forked process is gets from its parent until either the parent or child makes a change to the memory) and Shared Memory (a hunk of memory that multiple processes can access) that often get counted multiple times in ram usage stats. Of course, there is a certain amount of overhead involved in keeping track of a process, but probably not much more than is used in a traditional threaded browser model, so I wouldn't expect a huge difference given otherwise equivalent implementations.


I opened both FF and Opera and then opened the 3 youtube videos at the same time in both browsers. Opera had a noticeably higher memory usage, but it remained responsive. I could minimize it/maximize it, switch between tabs and the video was playing (relatively) smoothly in each of the Opera tabs. Firefox, on the other hand, was a mess. Took ages to bring up the window, the video was a slideshow and it took literally minutes to switch between tabs. I guess opera is just more efficient with it's memory usage?
Flash video is a really bad way to test browsers, because they all just embed the exact same library (NPSWF32.dll or something on Windows, libflashplayer.so on Linux). If you're using the HTML5 player on Youtube, then ignore the previous sentence. Chrome and Opera have faster JavaScript engines than Firefox, so I guess that might explain the difference, but in general video and the like are not good tests, because they mostly rely on external libraries (codecs or flash). Try opening the same handful of sites in each browser and seeing how much ram they each use, and how responsive (subjectively) they feel.


Would you consider a whole new OS?
My laptop used to perform very bad at playing HQ youtube movies, even at surfing the web without getting irritated.
I decided to give Ubuntu a try and it seems to use the resources much better then Windows did, it has everything you could possibly need on a classic machine and uses firefox.
I'm saying this because after using Opera for a while I ran into several websites and application not supporting it, that's not always Opera's fault but it is annoying.
Just letting you know ;)
I second this. Ubuntu has really come a long way, and it can be a superior experience to Windows, especially with low-end hardware. I have run modern versions of Ubuntu on 8 or-so-year-old hardware with no trouble. If regular Ubuntu is not fast enough for you, try Xubuntu, which has all the same programs but sports a much leaner UI. Ubuntu + Chrome is the winning combination for me (at least on a new machine with plenty of RAM), but it is using 200 Mb of ram, so you might want to stick with Opera or Firefox.
 
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I found that Windows XP ran better than Ubuntu on extremely old hardware (1 GHz Pentium III) but I did manage to cram 1.25 GB RAM into that thing, so it's a slightly different situation.
 
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