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vinifera

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Okay, I had a need to open topic like this, how will it end up... we'll see

long story short, I'm disgusted how these-day "modern" browsers eat RAM memory just for the sakes of it

I have 2 putters, older one runs XP with 1 GB RAM, other has win7 with 3 GB RAM

so I tried various (main) browsers excluding IE, to see results

for this basic test i took (this is not ad), this page: http://www.onemillionpicture.com/photo-albums.html

mind you when you open every picture in new tab, pictures are SMALL (res) !!!

- Firefox (new) on very start takes over 100 MB for no reason, when I opened 20 tabs, 800 MB was eaten

- so I put SRware Iron (chrome), same pages, same amount of tabs (same links), even worse result, it hogged down
PC to hell, no scrolling down was possible, mem usage over 800 MB

*Opera 18/19 I won't comment since its dog crap and I don't even consider that thing a browser anymore

- but since I am old Opera user, I tried the SAME links/pics/tabs on Opera 11.52, and behold the miracle
it only ate 360 MB RAM

------------------------------------------------

now, I am not here to promote old Opera, I am here to simply show and tell how "modern" browsers
eat memory for no reason providing nothing in defense

but we can't simply revert to old ones, since many pages are either blocking them
or they don't support CSS 3/HTML 5 to which people are transitioning now in web (tho slowly but it will come)

and honestly I am p***ed off, I use old Opera 11.52 for daily browsing and Iron on pages like youtube
where Opera is blocked or fails to load properly

so I googled on quick and found for now something called QtWeb, in short it is extra SMALL (not even 9MB installed)

it has SMALL memory footprint

I made same test like with other browsers here, same tabs/links, little guy ate only ~140 MB RAM

(it is webkit based too)

again this isn't advertising of neither browsers or pages, but I'd rather see what could others here
recommend as ALTERNATIVE to garbage that is hyped, and under this garbage I consider

Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE (all new)

are there any other browsers that utilise new web while not hogging down PC's ?

Edited by vinifera
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I had never heard of the Qt Web browser ... just finished downloading and setting it up. I kind of like it so far. It is low on using resources. I use the following browsers with Qt Web browser just added:

K-Meleon v1.6.0 beta 2.6 ... mem usage: 46 to 48 MB

Firefox Portable v3.6.28 ... mem usage: 45 MB

Opera Portable v11.64 ... mem usage: 45 MB

Qt Web v3.8.5 ... mem usage: 30 MB

Those usage figures can change a little but since I mostly use K-Meleon with several tabs usually open ... I see the usage jump around more on that browser but always close in that range. This is on XP Pro SP3. I usually don't have a problem with web pages or sites (so far) but when I do run into something odd then one of the other browsers will usually work.

I am using the Qt Web - Windows stand-alone portable executable version: QtWeb exe (7.5 MB)

http://www.qtweb.net/

http://www.qtweb.net/download.html

can be copied to CD, USB or other media to be run from directly

does NOT create any shortcuts and folders (except for Downloads)

does NOT include User Guide, however on-line Help can be used

portable version - user profiles not supported, settings and caches stored locally

Will see what others have to say on the subject.

Edited by duffy98
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K-Meleon v1.6.0 beta 2.6 ... mem usage: 46 to 48 MB

Firefox Portable v3.6.28 ... mem usage: 45 MB

Opera Portable v11.64 ... mem usage: 45 MB

problem with these is that they are all outdated

thats why I opened this thread

+add, I tried Midori and QupZilla, both webkit too and "lightweaight"

Midori was unable to even install but portable one worked, but it wasn't stable at all

while QupZilla even if advertised to be light, was same eating hog as normal chrome and even crashed to me (on that site #1)

after 10 tabs opened

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I just noticed you are using Windows 7 while I am on XP. I was using the newer portable versions of Opera and Firefox but they were not working to my satisfaction so in early October I decided to give these "older" versions of Opera and Firefox a try after reading that others were still using these versions over the newer ones. I don't do Facebook or other related sites and I'm happy with these not so complicated "older" versions at this time. They seem fast and not bloated to me but Qt Web v3.8.5 is new and may be the one to use if the other browsers can't handle a certain web page. The older browsers just seem a little less complicated.

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no offense, but optimized browsers like QtWeb prove that I don't
and not only that, it just proves how dev's today don't give a rats arse about optimizations
most go "with the flow", expecting that everyone runs latest and best

XP on 1 GB runs just fine, any game and/or app runs just fine (naturally not bloated ones)

try adding only 3 plugins to chrome/iron, on very start you will have each plugin to eat exactly
the same RAM as the original browser process, for what ? - do they run 3 more browser instances ?
shouldn't plugin be a plugin ?!! - a small side process with low consuption !

why does plugin that only adds a button to toolbar eat 100 MB RAM ?
did people missed period when such small irrelevant things supposed to take few kb or 1 MB at most ?

Edited by vinifera
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This QtWeb browser looks really promising.

I use Firefox as my main browser on Windows desktop (quad-core CPU, 4GB RAM, SSD) and it's usable although I can't say I like it. Still, it's probably the best out of the worst.

On Android I prefer to use Opera Mini / Opera Mobile Classic since its UI is very light and fast compared to the alternatives, and I can use Opera Link to synchronise Speed Dial and bookmarks between different devices. And due to a limited data plan I rely on the Opera's data compression very heavily.

The real problem is my laptop (Pentium III-M 933MHz, 640MB RAM, 5400rpm HDD). All mainstream browsers perform horrible on it. It's not only about how much RAM they use but also extreme CPU usage which makes the whole system unusable. At the moment I'm using Opera 12.x which seems to work way better than Firefox / Chromium on such an old hardware but I'll probably switch to QtWeb from now... This is my only laptop and I need to use it quite often so thank you for very much for this very useful information :)

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tomasz86 ... read your comment on the Qt Web browser. After you use it for awhile or test with it, I'd be interested in your comments or final verdict. Seems to be an OK browser so far for me.

...

Edited by duffy98
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tomasz86 ... read your comment on the Qt Web browser. After you use it for awhile or test with it, I'd be interested in your comments or final verdict. Seems to be an OK browser so far for me.

...

It's been just a few days so I've got no definite opinion on QtWeb yet but this is what I can say at the moment:

  • Speed is very impressive.
  • HTML5 / CSS3 supports seems to be decent but not perfect, ex. uploading images through drag & drop doesn't work in Imgur.
  • Changing browser identification seems to be a must as fonts are broken on some websites. There's a compatibility option and I've set it to Firefox:
    • Identified as QtWeb:

      BguEF2r.png

    • Identified as Firefox:

      OiENJ2G.png

  • The built-in AdBlock seems to do the job pretty well.
  • There are some UI glitches when system DPI is non-standard, ex.

    KYsFTiq.png

    but nothing serious.

  • The whole browsing experience feels kind of choppy as there's no smooth scrolling, loading animations on websites are static, etc. but this is a good thing if you think about pure speed, RAM usage and overall optimisation :)
More to come later.
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I like the Qt Web browser ... haven't used it as much as I would like. K-Meleon works OK most of the time but I just spent the last hour using the QT Web browser ... it's really a good browser ... very fast.

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