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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?"
Run the browser on the Corei7 guy's computer, use his RAM, and see it on yours. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This happened to me (an apparently many other interns) at one of the National Laboratories. The lab wasn't strapped for cash nor going away anytime soon. The real problem was that the guy that hired me didn't plan ahead and order a computer (which can take weeks to get thanks to procurement overhead), so he panicked and snagged one on the way to reapplication. I scrounged up some more RAM from reapp, and it worked fine for the three months I was there.
Nope, not at all. I work for one of the largest software companies that isn't going anywhere (even if you wanted it to). The process, at least in our office, is that new employees get whatever's available in the warehouse (currently mostly P4s with 1-2GB of RAM and WinXP) and a new machine is ordered for them (Core i5, 4-8GB, etc). It can take a while for the new hardware to arrive.
I have a feeling though that whoever is doing the hiring for our team doesn't pay enough attention to this, otherwise the new computers could be ordered in advance. But that's just annoying at most, and not an indication that the company is broke.
I too am running Firefox 3.6 on Debian Squeeze, but with 3gigs of RAM. I have FlashBlock and BetterPrivacy installed, but not NoScript. With only 20 tabs open I have to restart firefox at least once a week or my computer will grind to a halt. It seems to work like this:
Firefox: Hmm, there's still memory available, I'll hold more pages in memory.
Linux: Crap memory is getting tight, I should move some of this to swap.
Firefox: Hey look there's more memory available now, I'll hold more sites in memory.
And so on, until everything but firefox is pushed out to swap.
I am a managed IT provider for dozens of local companies.
Sometimes, all they'll pay for is used second PC's for some job functions and locations. If the job can be done using the hardware as provided, why should the company pay more?
If one of our clients interferes with a pc we provide, it is $250/hr charge, door to door, for us to look at it, PLUS penalties for equipment damage for parts.
If he damages the machine opening it, damages the ram, or simply messes up a setting in the machine playing with it, that's a charge his employer *will* get hit with.
In the last month alone i've responded to calls of someone who thought 3.5gb of ram wasnt enough, so he bestbuyed 8gb of ddr2 and shoved it in, breaking one ram slot holder; on an XP machine that cannot be upgraded to 7 yet for sfotware dependency issues; a guy who managed to break a dvi port trying to setup dual monitor with the old vga he had from home, and a woman who thought the filters on the machine were dirty, so she washed them with a hose. on the pc. while it was running ( dock yard inventory machine at a produce shipper)
Each of those calls were billed at $500+ in charges to the employer.
At least one person was fired and escorted out when i presented the bill.
How would you propose adding RAM to a maxed-out system?
The laptop I'm typing this from has 1GB of RAM. This is the maximum it supports; it cannot take more. Incidentally, the laptop is over 8 years old and runs fine, even the battery is still OK. It's a Celeron system currently running Lubuntu 10.04, since the LXDE desktop is leaner than Gnome or KDE (some unnecessary services are disabled also). I rely on Opera as the primary browser, and usually don't need a swap file even with a good number of tabs open in Opera, and some other applications running (right now: Inkscape, Gimp, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and a few lxterminal/bash/pcmanfm windows).
[warning: rant] This laptop has not been replaced partly because modern laptops with equivalent displays (1920x1200) are priced outrageously. I see no reason to downgrade to a 1920x1080 shortscreen, but object to the notion of paying double the money to keep the extra 120 rows of pixels. [apologies for rant]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire