Ask Slashdot: Best Small-Footprint Modern Browser?

Annirak writes "I've recently started a paid internship at a company which is expanding faster than their IT department can supply new hardware. As a consequence, I've been issued a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB of RAM. Currently, I am using Firefox 4, but I find that it eats up far too much of my limited RAM. I'd rather not give up some of the more modern UI features that are offered by the current versions of Firefox and Chrome, but I need a smaller footprint. What other browsers are out there which could help me conserve resources?"

Comments

Opera

[Derf_X]

I use Opera 11 with Windows 2000 on my P3 with 256 MB of RAM and it works quite well.

Obvious answer

[mrwolf007]

is of course Lynx.

Aside from that Opera should require at lot less resources.

Lighten the Load

[Anonymous Coward]

Try disabling flash, other plugins, and javascript. It makes 99% of sites faster, and only breaks about 30% of sites. Of the sites that aren't worthless, only about 5% are broken (mostly shopping sites).

If you install NoScript in Firefox, you can selectively enable/disable scripts and flash and other plugins for specific domains, only enabling what you want.

This also prevents most advertisements from loading.

Lynx

[fahrbot-bot]

Lynx

Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support SSL and many HTML features. Tables are formatted using spaces, while frames are identified by name and can be explored as if they were separate pages. Lynx cannot inherently display various types of non-text content on the web, such as images and video, but it can launch external programs to handle it, such as an image viewer or a video player.

Re:Lynx

[lidocaineus]

Why do people keep suggesting Lynx? I'm glad you know about 90s-era text browsing, but even that's moved on. If you're going this route, use Links people!!

Re:Opera

[Missing.Matter]

Agreed. Make sure you turn off the features you don't want like the mail client, web server, torrent client, etc. It can get very slim.

Opera

[vga_init]

I think you would want to give Opera a try. I compared some of the major browsers several months ago, and what I found was that Chrome was fast but uses RAM excessively, and Firefox was slow but used less RAM. Opera seemed to be strong in both speed and memory conservation, the main drawback being that it is not open source. Firefox is faster now that version 4 is out, putting it in competitive range of Opera, although I'd wager that Opera is still more efficient.

Now if you're able and willing to try non-mainstream browsers, there are a lot of fun things you can play with. Epiphany is a popular underdog choice, and other alternative browsers run a full gamut of niches. In the past I've tried Konqueror, Midori, Aurora, Dillo, and yes, even elinks (I've actually used it productively, so I'm not joking). There is even that funny K-Meleon browser for windows. I don't know how many of these are still in active development, but many alternative browsers do excel in being lightweight, so on systems with limited resources you will see noticeable speed gains. The downside is that you will get compatibility problems, and the Javascript engine may be slow.

If you really want to have fun try browsers designed for embedded/mobile systems, such as Android.

Re:Opera

[WOFall]

By "turn off" I assume you mean "don't turn on", because if you don't set up a mail account, enable Unite, or download a torrent with the built in client, these features will use the same amount of memory as they would disabled.

Re:Use less RAM

[Enderandrew]

You can also configure Firefox not to cache rendered pages in RAM.

But Arora might be the browser you're looking for.

http://code.google.com/p/arora/