Which browser do you recommend for a low-resource PC?
1d 18h ago by lemmy.world/u/Cromer4ever in nostupidquestions
I have 4GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron N4000. Chrome and Edge work decently, but they always freeze at the worst possible moments. Firefox, Brave?
Firefox with Ublock Origin is pretty much the gold standard. But, it likely won't do terribly better. Modern webpages are big.
You need to either Linux to get the OS RAM usage down or get another 4gb in there. Both would help a ton.
Could try blocking js. Depending on user preference.
I assumed Linux given the specs and that Chrome works at all.
Vote for firefox as you should be anyway. Another trick to try is an explicit tab unloader extension (for fine control of unloading) and/or the built in about:unloads .
All browsers seem to accumulate memory (and cpu usage) over time, sometimes you just have to shut it down and restart. (AKA have you tried turning it off and on again :) A daily (possibly shorter if needed) service to restart it can work.
Relevant: https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit
Maybe something intended for weak hardware and older versions of Windows:
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
A Linux install with something lightweight like XFCE for desktop environment would do better probably.
supermium is slower than normal chromium because they redirect certain system calls to some external dll that causes overhead iirc
If you’re open to putting a new OS on, there’s Linux Lite and it’s quite nice. It comes with Firefox.
Minimum Requirements:
- 1.5 Ghz Dual Core Processor
- 4GB Memory
- 40GB HDD/SSD/NVME
- VGA, DVI, DP or HDMI screen capable of 1366x768 resolution
- DVD drive or USB port for the ISO image
- Disable Secure Boot
I also run a very low end machine with 4GB ram.
The issue often isn’t the browser or even the website, exactly, it’s the tons and tons of advertising and tracking crap that is in the background of most sites nowadays.
The way around that is to run a solid ad blocker. uBlock Orgin is the best, but Google (and maybe MS? I don’t use windows) has fucked over plugins to specifically make things like it not work.
So, what you want to do is run Firefox with uBlock Origin with the more aggressive blocking settings in both uBlock and Firefox. Extra credit for setting up PiHole to block a different set of crap.
The one thing is that this will absolutely break certain sites. But fuck those sites, they’re fucking you.
File browser
Firefox with ublock origin
100% agree that you'll have far better performance with a light Linux distro. If you're having trouble running a browser, that's 5% of what's running with some bloated OS chugging along just to show you a desktop.
Waterfox.
I went through same scenario a few years ago. At the time, I used Firefox with uBlock origin. Brave is chromium based, so don't expect lower RAM usage from it.
If you're using Linux, look into zram and zswap. The first one gave a second wind to my notebook back then.
Try https://www.palemoon.org/,it's a fork of Firefox from a few years ago before it got big.
Before it got big? It was recommended to me by not a very tech savvy person maybe around 20 years ago now. To give you some perspective around the time frame, it would have been a couple years later when I bought a 2gb Windows 7 netbook that actually ran borderlands, and got into the Google ecosystem.
Your timeline is pretty off.
Chrome is a fork of Konqueoror, before it got big
I've tried a half dozen common ones - Falkon is described as lightweight. I use it sometimes.
Can you put extra RAM in it?
According to the specs their cpu can take a maximum of 8GB ddr4 ram, the motherboard and the price could still limit this though
I’m not going to sugar coat it but your ask might be a bit hard if you want a relatively clean browsing experience.
You’ll need a browser that can at the very least use addons for ad blocking / script blocking / browser and OS spoofing.
But if you are on Linux then the lowest resource browser will always be via the terminal but then you miss things like layout etc… :)
seamonkey, but compat with many modern websites aren't good
falkon might kinda work
people here probably hates this but if you're on m$ windows, mypal68 and 360chrome(modded version) kinda works well on potato machines. i used to use 360chrome v86 on a atom z8350 with 2gb ram running win10 x32
A long time ago, I used Midori (the pre-2019 version), I remember it was the only browser that ran streaming video without issues. The browser itself is a bit flaky though.
Firefox is totally doable on that much RAM. Not going to be pleasant, but usable. You want to strip down as much resource usage as you can: inside Firefox throw in uBlock Origin and Tab Unloader; outside Firefox use a stripped down desktop like XFCE or just a straight low resource window manager with no desktop environment (I was a big fan of WindowMaker back in the day).
links?