Ask Slashdot: What Lightweight Alternative To Chrome or Firefox Do You Use? 158
thegarbz writes: It seems not a day goes by without yet another story reflecting poorly on major browsers. Not uncommon are stories that are mixed with a degree of bloat, either discussing rarely used features or directly criticizing memory consumption of major browsers. Unfortunately memory consumption is quite often the result of complete feature implementation of technologies used on the web, including DRM for streaming services and WebRTC. Other times it's the result of security measures, feature creep, or poor coding.
So in 2019 for those of us with slower tablets, what browser do you use as an alternative to the big two? How well does it work with the modern HTML5 internet? Are websites frequently broken does the simplicity of other browsers largely go unnoticed?
So in 2019 for those of us with slower tablets, what browser do you use as an alternative to the big two? How well does it work with the modern HTML5 internet? Are websites frequently broken does the simplicity of other browsers largely go unnoticed?
Lynx? (Score:5, Insightful)
Short of Lynx there really isn't one. A browser without HTML5 and Javascript would be nice. Although only half the internet would actually work.
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well there is Dillo, for people who really want that distinctive Netscape 4.0 look to websites.
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
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anybody else read that as "dildo"?
You see what you wish for?
Re: Lynx? (Score:4, Funny)
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Oh man, I totally forgot Dillo existed. I used to use it on my crappy old laptop with 256MB of RAM and Puppy Linux.
Looks like it's pretty much unusable since "Web 2.0" took off though.
Re:Lynx? (Score:4, Interesting)
I absolutely use lynx as a lightweight alternative -- when I *need* to, which is very seldom. That's when for some reason I need to get to something like a router admin page when I'm on a system that's starved for resources.
I've certainly tried other lightweight alternatives they seem to me more like curiosities than practical solutions to problems I actually have. If you want to show off Linux working on a twenty year-old laptop, Dillo makes an impressive demo.
I guess I've never personally encountered a use-case that falls between "absolute maximum compatibility" and "absolute minimum resource usage".
Re: Lynx? (Score:2)
Telnet or wget (Score:2)
Lynx is too heavy.
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So try Links. [debian.org]
Re:Lynx? (Score:5, Informative)
Short of Lynx there really isn't one. A browser without HTML5 and Javascript would be nice. Although only half the internet would actually work.
NetSurf [netsurf-browser.org] is an alternative to Lynx if you want images too. It's not going to get you JavaScript but that is part of the appeal of these options. And Links [twibright.com] renders tables a little better than Lynx and some people find the mouse support preferable (I find it annoying).
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There's also links. Text, no JavaScript, no images, but uses a mouse (click on the top "line"). Run it in a terminal with a black background, white letters, mono spaced 20pt sans serif and get that old skool thing going.
Very legible if you have vision problems. Runs fast because you're not loading all those ad images, social media sharing icons, web bugs, and 10 megs of JavaScript for one lousy page with 500 words of hard-to-read small light text against a slightly lighter or darker background.
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I prefer Links over Lynx, but I have both installed.
Arachne is lightweight browser that runs on DOS, though I'm not sure if it's still being developed.
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Just use Firefox with all the stuff you don't like disabled.
Go to about:config and disable WebRTC, disable the DRM stuff, disable HTML5 video and audio. Then install uBlock Origin a set it to be fairly aggressive.
You can also use things like NoScript to selectively enable more features on sites that break but which you need to use.
Pale Moon (Score:2)
...Works well!
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I use it on my old netbook running Linux. It works well on an older machine and does everything I want it to do without the extra 'fluff'.
Re: Pale Moon (Score:2)
When there are no compelling stories... (Score:2)
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That's a sticky question.
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You are doing it wrong, then.
People complain about bloat in browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
but they fail to realize the atrocious mishmash of turdy software technologies that have been piled on in them over the decades.
Browser ARE bloat. Some are a bit quicker, some are a bit slower. But fundamentally they're a document presentation software that have been transformed into the worst kind of "smart" terminals because they weren't really designed, but rather sort of evolved more and more to do stuff they were never meant to do in the first place.
The best proof of that is how much CPU and memory these things guzzle. Hundreds of megabytes for a simple page isn't uncommon, and oftentimes low-end computers can only run a browser and not much else. As a guy from the days when people took pride in proper software design and coding, I find people accepting this as normal today nothing short of amazing...
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the atrocious mishmash
More railing against our esteemed editor? Oh wait -- never mind.
Re:People complain about bloat in browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
Browsers don't use resources. Websites do.
Some of them will continuously load data in the background and never make it available for the browser to free.
And boom, you get a new user blaming the browser.
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I disagree. On a weaker CPU/GPU combination, Opera 12 could alt tab to and from some of the games that pushed it to the limit, without really impacting performance.
Firefox and Chrome both had to be shut down to avoid these problems, since they essentially highjack a entire core, and highjack quite a bit of GPU overhead.
On a more modern system this isn't as much as a problem, but its disconcerting. We could blame the websites, however its a issue with how resource hungry the browsers are.
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I would have to disagree (but only slightly). Unplug from the network and start a browser. I'm sure you will notice that resources have been used.
I will agree that websites use way more resources than the actual browser but to say that browsers don't use resources is a bit of a stretch.
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Browsers don't use resources. Websites do.
I disagree with this completely. e.g. Loading up Firefox with about:blank as the start page consumes 250MB of RAM, which is nothing compared to typing this to you in Chrome, with only Slashdot open in a tab, and Slashdot hasn't changed significantly over the past 10 years (not for lack of trying).
The web standards themselves have driven browsers to do more, but until Slashdot starts with real-time voice chat to argue with each other using webRTC it's kind of hard to blame websites.
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Absolutely agree. Frankly the OS should let us limit those resources.
IMHO, a proper browser would let me control download rate, total bytes downloaded, "prefetching / preloading", esp. audio / video / large graphics. Every now and then I click a link that saturates my connection, the "page" looks like it's going to be hundreds of pages concatenated into one huge scroll hell, often full of GB of resized images.
Since we don't have a legal system and web police to control idiot websites and idiot web "develo
Re:People complain about bloat in browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is a name for this: Brutalist web design.
Like brutalist architecture it's functional and plain, exposing the structure of the site.
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I saw a PDF load and thought wtf? Then I realized, html is a document. PDF is a document. It's a document viewer. And it's the biggest attack surface you have. Biggest target. Fuck all of that.
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Indeed ! May be it's time for us techies to design a new hypertext language to replace HTML + CSS + JS + etc. May be more structured ? Based on JSON or any simple to parse format ?
Go with Lynx or Links (Score:2)
https://lynx.browser.org/ [browser.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Lynx and/or links work pretty well, but don't expect to be able to buy stuff on amazon (note: haven't tested).
JavaScript support is typically spotty.
But fast... Whooosh!
Ad blocking (Score:5, Informative)
Using adblockers and other content blockers (such as NoScript or uMatrix) is probably the best way to reduce resource consumption.
But if you want another browser, there is K-Meleon (Gecko) or Midori (Webkit). Still almost as heavy as Firefox and Chrome though.
Re:Ad blocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Using adblockers and other content blockers (such as NoScript or uMatrix) is probably the best way to reduce resource consumption.
I don't use adblockers to reduce bloat. I use adblockers because you can't trust the source of the ads themselves. Reducing bloat and speeding up performance are just bonus byproducts.
WaterFox. What others use original Firefox add-ons (Score:4, Interesting)
I need to run some add-ons that Firefox abandoned without explanation.
Any other browsers recommended besides Pale Moon and WaterFox?
Is Chrome still installing Windows System Services?
Re:WaterFox. What others use original Firefox add- (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is. Turn off "multi-process" (In General options) and it goes back to what Firefox used to use in resources. Multi-process makes it use more of everything, just like Chrome.
You should add the Classic Theme restorer add-on to make it shine.
I boycott Palemoon due to its anti TOR stance.
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Is Chrome still installing Windows System Services?
Most certainly not on my Mac, and I doubt on a Linux system either.
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There's no need to be dickish about it. Firefox explained repeatedly why they abandoned those extensions and it's been hashed over here time and time and time again.
You might not like it or agree with the reasons but don't pretend they don't exist.
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Extensions did more that just fancy up the UI using XUL, so completely removing the old infrastructure and killing ALL extensions was not justified.
Number one rule of software development: if you have to rewire everything from scratch to get to version 2.0, what you're doing it almost guaranteed to fail.
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Except that underlying infrastructure was causing the problem. You're number one rule is also stupid on the face of it as shown by many examples of where rewrites have improve things, e.g. Windows entire net code was rewritten from scratch and for the better by a long shot.
Or a better example: Firefox's plugin infrastructure. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean they haven't solved the original problem while maintaing support for the world's most popular plugins.
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Extensions did more that just fancy up the UI using XUL, so completely removing the old infrastructure and killing ALL extensions was not justified.
Those two statements are not connected. The architecture for extensions proved problematic when it came to security, sandboxing and threading. Mozilla felt they couldn't continue developing a high performance browser with the old architecture and in order to keep up with the competition, they had to replace the mechanism.
The performance of firefox is way, way up
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Both Waterfox and Pale Moon use far more RAM and are much, much slower than Firefox.
Firefox has done a lot to reduce resource consumption, which has not been back-ported to either of those browsers. They are both extremely slow and clunky in comparison.
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Using adblockers and other content blockers (such as NoScript or uMatrix) is probably the best way to reduce resource consumption.
It's a drop in the bucket. My own experience seems to show that ads tend to hog CPU during rotations, and consume bandwidth but do very little in terms of bloat or memory consumption.
Happy with Firefox but ... (Score:2)
I'm happy with Firefox on my home PC, iPad and Android phone for general use, but on the two portable devices I also use Firefox Focus for those quick "just find something" situations. On the PC, recent versions of Firefox have actually gotten a little better in resource usage terms. but it has 24GB of RAM, so I don't mind if it uses some of that.
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I still have not found an acceptable alternative to Firefox that can use the script blocking and ad blocking plug-ins effectively. I tried a few of the common alternative browsers, and they were clunky or not fully functional with all the protection I want.
Like the earlier comment "web browsers = bloat" and another comment below "websites = complex applications" I have just come to accept that people need a decent system to run a web browser. If Firefox wants to run 8 threads and use 4 GB of RAM, then so
There is no real alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There is no real alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
Now they're full fledge shoddily-coded interpreted applications with a rich and needlessly complex runtime environment with half an ass on your desktop and the other have all the way across the internet.
There, FTFY.
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Unfortunately the modern web is too complex (Score:3, Interesting)
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>"Now days there is no major independent browser outside of "
Now days there are really only three major browsers: Firefox, Chrom* (anything based on Chromium), and Safari. I don't really even have to say "major" anymore, because "minor" is so small as to be statistical noise. And non-Chrom* "minor" browsers are almost all based on the older, outdated, slow, mostly unsupported, and no longer secure non-Quantum Firefox. Safari is proprietary and single-platform.
So there are only two multiplatform brows
on my phone? (Score:3)
Fuck "lightweight". (Score:4, Informative)
Lightweight is usually code-speak for "insecure" or "feature incomplete".
It also means "drowning in ads".
So I'll stick with something like Firefox or derivatives that can adblock.
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Hey, if you want to open yourself up to a screen-full of ads, and the attack vectors such things open up...knock yourself out.
Security >>> Speed Any day of the week.
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Not necessarily.
NetSurf (Score:4, Interesting)
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Brave (Score:2)
Safari (Score:2)
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It should be pretty good, it's derived from khtml [wikipedia.org]. Except for the stuff Apple lathered on of course.
Midori, Falkon/Qupzilla, Slimjet (Score:5, Informative)
Nameless command line browser? (Score:3)
My memory must be going... I can't remember the name now, but there was a command line browser I used to use when I needed to examine the low level handshaking... My fuzzy recollection is that I invoked it from the shell with a set of parameters that put the exchanges directly into a file...
I'm almost sure it was not Lynx, though the description of Lynx sounds similar. I sort of remember Lynx as the next step up. I just checked the man page for Lynx, and don't see the parameters I remember... Unless it's tlog?
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Was it ? I use it regularly. Can work with a mouse and does support some formatting unlike lynx. [elinks.or.cz]
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elinks [elinks.or.cz] Somehow my link got screwed up.
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Thanks, but I'm still not sure. It was so long ago that I wonder if it might have been links. When I get back to the Linux box later on I'll see if I can find it, though I'm not sure it matters much. Not really relevant to this discussion since I obviously don't use it anymore... I was actually scanning the discussion to jog my memory, but didn't get jogged, so maybe that also indicates that no one else is using it these days.
Wish: A good USB browser (Score:2)
I wish Firefox would be USB installable. I would like to just load FF onto a USB and be able to run *MY* FF in a sandbox that doesn't leave anything at all behind on the host computer. The point isn't really security, as the host computer is a perfect Man-in-the-Middle, but rather just to have MY firefox on various shared PCs that I use rather than having to sign in.
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Does the PortatbleApps version of Firefox no longer exist? I used to have it and Portable Thunderbird on a flash drive a decade ago.
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Yeah, reading the comment before replying fail.
Try reading the comment before replying.
Lightweight browsers (Score:4, Insightful)
This is really the wrong question. The problem isn’t truly at the client end... it’s all the extra crap pretty much every website is pushing down the pipe alongside the content you actually want. Of course the browser is going to tie up a lot of resources when it tries to process all the cruft.
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Yep. It's been going on for some time, though. Some years ago, by brother-in-law was showing his new toy: a cellular hot spot about half the size of a playing card with a data limit that he managed to max out in less than about a half hour of browsing his stock prices. The pages he was visiting weren't really all that elaborate but he was unaware of all the "stuff" that had to be downloade
Not Really (Score:3)
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This is really the wrong question. The problem isn’t truly at the client end...
Is that why typing this answer to you requires close to 400MB of RAM? On this super interactive highly Web5.0 site like Slashdot? This is the Slashdot that remains so unchanged that even unicode is as yet unsupported.
Blaming the site is fine and all, but then the reality is when you look at those sites you realise your browser is consuming very similar resources whether it is pushing you adds, tracking your brainwaves, or just displaying about:blank.
dillo (Score:2)
L'ho detto!
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Palemoon (Score:2)
Dillo (Score:2)
Well, for quick and simple search , find and read, i use dillo
It do not support javascript, it supports some css, no animations, but most web works well for search and read, even if sometimes the web page look is totally different (and we see that the small icon is really a full HD jpg and totally waste of resources)... but again, to read reviews, manuals howto, blog posts, documentation, it works very well.
When the site do not work, i jump to firefox, with umatrix and noscript and slowly try to load whatev
Just get a bigger computer, it's what I did (Score:2)
I upgraded to a used Dell T5600 workstation complete with a 8 core hyperthreaded xeon and 32 GB of ram running an SSD. Finally I've got enough power to run firefox with a hundred tabs open.
Epic Browser (Score:2)
It's chromium based. It has built in adblocker and tracking cookie blocker. It also has built in proxy servers in 8 countries.
https://www.epicbrowser.com/ [epicbrowser.com]
There is no lightweight browser (Score:2)
Browsers nowadays are essentially OSes. The "bloat" is what's needed to run the modern web.
Sure, you can have browsers that look lighter, or content blockers that clean up pages but it doesn't remove the inherent complexity of the browser.
Or, you can have browsers that are really lightweight (lynx...) but it just means that a lot of sites won't work because the necessary features are not supported.
Yes, a lot of sites are bloated, but that's not the fault of the browser. Browsers are juste the execution envi
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Midori (Score:2)
It's bloat... but is it a lot of bloat? (Score:2)
So here I am on a fresh run of Chrome opening a single tab to Slashdot... reporting ~550MB used with 14 processes, the biggest one ~150MB.
Is this bloat? Sure, it's half a gig, but computers with 1GB of ram have been available for 20 years now. It's bigger than it used to be, but I can run 3D games, complex HTML5, and even emulate other operating systems in a browser tab. Even a $35 raspberry pi has a gig of ram.
So, I can have a machine with a small amount of ram and be conservative with my browsing habits.
When it's 300-500 MB per app (Score:2)
What other non-browser applications can you run at the same time as your 550 MB browser, such as an IDE for programming, a chat client for communicating with your boss/client while working from home, and a separate chat client for communicating with the community of users of your programming language? A lot of these (Visual Studio Code, Skype, Slack, and Discord) use a framework that in essence embeds a copy of Chromium hardcoded to one website. Developers of applications that use Microsoft's Electron or Fa
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That solves the development part, not so much the communication with the boss/client (Skype or Slack) or with the language community (Discord) part.
Memory usage is overrated (Score:2)
This whining about browser memory usage is as persistent as it is overrated.
Memory is exactly zero use to you unless it's being used for something. Clearly the browser could unload all of the tabs (and there's many extensions to let you do this) but you don't want that do you? You want to be able to switch between them instantly. Then you leave dozens upon dozens open, and then *whine* about the amount of memory that's being used, even if it --- and it usually is --- less than half of the RAM in your box.
Ch
Old Opera and Vivaldi (Score:2)
I mostly use Old Opera (12.18) and most sites with javascript OFF, a few with it on, and chrome-based Vivaldi for some sites. I highly recommend it if you're using Chrome. In fact, it's worth a try even if you're not using Chrome, but it'll take a few minutes to go through the settings.
Firefox properly setup (Score:2)
Can make Firefox more lightweight launching it like this, will force to use only one process.
set MOZ_FORCE_DISABLE_E10S=1
start "" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
its not possible to do this in options anymore, need a little batch file.
Bonus points If add uBlock Origin and NoScript extensions.
Now I know I'm old (Score:3)
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Well, until they removed the option to disable non-UA CSS in the browser and everyone moved from graceful degradation to progressive enhancement (with the concomitant assumption that everyone would support custom CSS at all times), you could do just that.
Now, everything will look like crap, because they've never tested their stuff without the extra styling.
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Please pray for our friends in the Bahamas and pray that they have prepared and that there is no loss of life
And that's going to help them - how? Prayer doesn't work, beyond a slight placebo, if at all.
Pray that they have prepared? That there is no loss of life? Are you serious? These things have happened already - no matter how hard you pray, that is not going to change. Suggesting otherwise is insulting and demeaning to the victims.
The only thing that this achieves is to make those who pray feel good about themselves - how virtuous am I, that I am praying so hard for them! - despite the fact that they are, by an
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Prayer can help. No one is saying that is all we should do. Even the off topic post didn't suggest that.
It's meaningless and pointless to you and the mods on slashdot. That doesn't mean it actually is meaningless and pointless.
Re: Pray for our Bahamian friends (Score:4, Insightful)
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I assume you think we should pray to the christian god?
The one who sent prophets and even his own son to... One specific little backwater of the world to tell only THOSE people about a set of rules that would be used to judge the whole planet by, and whereby people in say Papua New Guinea who STILL, some 2000+ years later are uncontacted, will pretty much all be going to hell for original sin because they dont have a fucking clue that they are supposed to do something to get to heaven?
That god?
They may do b
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It isn't our fault the New Guineans are going to Hell. The plans for going to Heaven were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
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And yes, prayer works. Profoundly.
Of course it does. The GP stated this face. It makes you feel good about yourself while doing nothing at all to help the problem.
Congratulations, prayer worked.
Most of us stopped talking to imaginary friends when we were 5.
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Perhaps less praying and more researching into who can actually help.
Re: Firefox preview (Score:2)