Good lightweight browsers

[InterLinked]

Has anyone found any real lightweight browsers that actually work well on the modern web? By this, I mean tabbed browsing, HTML5, CSS3, etc. - basically drop-in compatibility with the duopoly of browsers that dominate today.

I'm talking about something like QtWeb, which I found mentioned on here, and is actually lightweight but incompatible with many things I need to view. Any way to have my cake and eat it, too?

Even K-Meleon is not all it's cracked up to be. Uses 120 MB of RAM viewing the same page that only brings QtWeb up to 68K RAM.

Looking up "lightweight web browser Windows" online is useless. They bring up all sorts of trash solutions, like Opera, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. Gak!

When I say lightweight, I mean lightweight, not "lightweight if you your PC is a tricked out server", which is what all these other sites claim.

Running Windows 7 on actually decent hardware, but I'm tired of browsers taking over the computer, and want something that does its job and nothing more.

Customization, easy toggles to disable JS, images, pop-ups, ads, etc. a bonus.

I don't care if sites tell me "this browser is not supported", as long as it actually works. I use Iron 70 mostly (fork of Chrome 70), and it's more than 2 years out of date so I get these messages all the time, but there's not actually anything that doesn't work. It's just FUD.

[Gansangriff]

Pale Moon might fit your needs. Try out their current one or maybe "Roytams forked Moon". It's just important, that you ask questions at the right place, because Moonchild Productions, the Pale Moon developer, doesn't support the forked version of his browsers.

Of course it's a niche browser, meaning not everything will run. With Google ruling more and more parts of the internet and their browser engine becoming like the standard, things are tough for these guys, but they still stand strong. Palemoon has the good old Firefox addons. I use it with the old NoScript V5 to block JavaScript, when it's needed.

Is it all about the RAM the browser uses? If you're short on RAM, then yes. For comparison, let's put the old Pentium 3 on the table. A nineteen years old computer with a single core at 1 GHz and 512 MB of RAM. If your computer looks more modern than this machine, then it should be absolutely capable of a good amount of fun on the web. On screen we have Roytams browser (New Moon) in the No-SSE2 version for old processors. It's lightweight and capable of accessing most websites, including my banking website, Invidous Youtube videos, the web flea market ebay-kleinanzeigen (script-heavy web site) and of course the MSFN forum (also with scripts turned on).

Some values of various browsers when idling on a blank page.

Edge Win10 -> 150-200 MB
Palemoon on Linux Mint 64-Bit -> 163 MB
Palemoon (from last year) on Salix-Linux 32-Bit -> 155 MB
Palemoon on Win10 -> 120 MB
Roytams Moon on 32-Bit XP -> 95 MB
Retrozilla (old Firefox) on XP-VM -> 23 MB
Netscape from 2008 (old Firefox) -> 15 MB
Dillo on Salix-Linux 32-Bit -> 9 MB

But that doesn't indicate a lot. Because old Firefoxes and Dillo aren't capable of the terrible modern stuff.

[InterLinked]

5 hours ago, Gansangriff said:

Pale Moon might fit your needs. Try out their current one or maybe "Roytams forked Moon". It's just important, that you ask questions at the right place, because Moonchild Productions, the Pale Moon developer, doesn't support the forked version of his browsers.

Of course it's a niche browser, meaning not everything will run. With Google ruling more and more parts of the internet and their browser engine becoming like the standard, things are tough for these guys, but they still stand strong. Palemoon has the good old Firefox addons. I use it with the old NoScript V5 to block JavaScript, when it's needed.

Is it all about the RAM the browser uses? If you're short on RAM, then yes. For comparison, let's put the old Pentium 3 on the table. A nineteen years old computer with a single core at 1 GHz and 512 MB of RAM. If your computer looks more modern than this machine, then it should be absolutely capable of a good amount of fun on the web. On screen we have Roytams browser (New Moon) in the No-SSE2 version for old processors. It's lightweight and capable of accessing most websites, including my banking website, Invidous Youtube videos, the web flea market ebay-kleinanzeigen (script-heavy web site) and of course the MSFN forum (also with scripts turned on).

Some values of various browsers when idling on a blank page.

Edge Win10 -> 150-200 MB
Palemoon on Linux Mint 64-Bit -> 163 MB
Palemoon (from last year) on Salix-Linux 32-Bit -> 155 MB
Palemoon on Win10 -> 120 MB
Roytams Moon on 32-Bit XP -> 95 MB
Retrozilla (old Firefox) on XP-VM -> 23 MB
Netscape from 2008 (old Firefox) -> 15 MB
Dillo on Salix-Linux 32-Bit -> 9 MB

But that doesn't indicate a lot. Because old Firefoxes and Dillo aren't capable of the terrible modern stuff.

Hi, there,

  I've actually use both Pale Moon and New Moon, and I have New Moon. It's not at all what I would consider a lightweight browser. It uses more memory than Iron does! Something like a few hundred MB just to open and load a single page. Interesting it's only 95 MB on XP, but there must be more overhead on Windows 7.

That's why I'm struggling here. I've tried all the browsers that most people consider "lightweight" that are somewhat modern, e.g. New Moon, and my finding is that they are not lightweight at all, CPU and RAM just go through the roof, just like any browser.

QTWeb is the only one I have used that comes close, but if I load bing.com, the entire browser crashes, so it's obviously not going to work out.

[Gansangriff]

Oh dear! Is your Windows 7 installation allright? And the hardware, too? What kind of hardware do you use? How strong is it? Any broken capacitors? What's with the graphics card? A new Windows is highly dependant on a good functioning graphics acceleration, else the CPU has to do all the work and overloads quickly.

1 hour ago, Dylan Cruz said:

Interesting it's only 95 MB on XP, but there must be more overhead on Windows 7.

How does the 32-Bit version of New Moon perform on your computer? Maybe even the No-SSE version is worth a try? It isn't the brand new version, but still performs well. Big sites changed quite a lot on the web, so if you want to keep in touch with them, unfortuneately a somewhat modern browser is necessary. For basic text reading with pictures, Netscape is enough of course.

[UCyborg]

Lightweight and compatible with modern web is an oxymoron. Moonchild Productions' browsers are good for bells and whistles, but also have problems with memory leaks, though that seems to be a common problem with anything descending from Firefox.

[InterLinked]

4 hours ago, UCyborg said:

Lightweight and compatible with modern web is an oxymoron. Moonchild Productions' browsers are good for bells and whistles, but also have problems with memory leaks, though that seems to be a common problem with anything descending from Firefox.

I was afraid that was the case

We just need QTWeb updated for the modern web...

I was able to get it to not crash on one page by disabling JS, so that's a relief, but o/w, it loads many things slowly, improperly, or not at all.

 

If someone could make a decent browser that was lightweight < 100 MB idle, < 150 MB with a couple tabs open, that would be awesome! $$$$.

[Jody Thornton]

5 hours ago, InterLinked said:

I was afraid that was the case

We just need QTWeb updated for the modern web...

I was able to get it to not crash on one page by disabling JS, so that's a relief, but o/w, it loads many things slowly, improperly, or not at all.

 

If someone could make a decent browser that was lightweight < 100 MB idle, < 150 MB with a couple tabs open, that would be awesome! $$$$.

But the more compatible you make it, the more RAM it will take up.  Websites, data sets and scripts are just too large to run in small amounts of RAM.

I'm running Windows 8 with the old Vista mail client Windows Mail kludged in.  Right now, it occupies 25.5 MB.  Notepad, teensy weensy Notepad with a blank page takes 1 MB.  What you want is something with the overhead of Windows 95, that yet can browse the modern web - WILL NOT HAPPEN 

 

[InterLinked]

5 minutes ago, Jody Thornton said:

But the more compatible you make it, the more RAM it will take up.  Websites, data sets and scripts are just too large to run in small amounts of RAM.

I'm running Windows 8 with the old Vista mail client Windows Mail kludged in.  Right now, it occupies 25.5 MB.  Notepad, teensy weensy Notepad with a blank page takes 1 MB.  What you want is something with the overhead of Windows 95, that yet can browse the modern web - WILL NOT HAPPEN 

 

Yeah, you might be right... but I feel like you could get close.

Windows Mail, when I ported it to W7, just crashes mostly. MailNews is nice but with 11 accounts it's a memory account.

Something like QTWeb that makes it easy to toggle on/off different things like JS would at least allow easy reduction of resources. Also has automatic ad blocking which is probably more efficient than ublock origin.

[Adriann]

Interesting