I have 4GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron N4000. Chrome and Edge work decently, but they always freeze at the worst possible moments. Firefox, Brave?
A long time ago, I used Midori (the pre-2019 version), I remember it was the only browser that ran streaming video without issues. The browser itself is a bit flaky though.
seamonkey, but compat with many modern websites aren’t good
falkon might kinda work
people here probably hates this but if you’re on m$ windows, mypal68 and 360chrome(modded version) kinda works well on potato machines. i used to use 360chrome v86 on a atom z8350 with 2gb ram running win10 x32
Firefox with ublock origin
Can you put extra RAM in it?
File browser
100% agree that you’ll have far better performance with a light Linux distro. If you’re having trouble running a browser, that’s 5% of what’s running with some bloated OS chugging along just to show you a desktop.
I also run a very low end machine with 4GB ram.
The issue often isn’t the browser or even the website, exactly, it’s the tons and tons of advertising and tracking crap that is in the background of most sites nowadays.
The way around that is to run a solid ad blocker. uBlock Orgin is the best, but Google (and maybe MS? I don’t use windows) has fucked over plugins to specifically make things like it not work.
So, what you want to do is run Firefox with uBlock Origin with the more aggressive blocking settings in both uBlock and Firefox. Extra credit for setting up PiHole to block a different set of crap.
The one thing is that this will absolutely break certain sites. But fuck those sites, they’re fucking you.
I’ve tried a half dozen common ones - Falkon is described as lightweight. I use it sometimes.
Firefox with Ublock Origin is pretty much the gold standard. But, it likely won’t do terribly better. Modern webpages are big.
You need to either Linux to get the OS RAM usage down or get another 4gb in there. Both would help a ton.
Could try blocking js. Depending on user preference.
I assumed Linux given the specs and that Chrome works at all.
Vote for firefox as you should be anyway. Another trick to try is an explicit tab unloader extension (for fine control of unloading) and/or the built in about:unloads .
All browsers seem to accumulate memory (and cpu usage) over time, sometimes you just have to shut it down and restart. (AKA have you tried turning it off and on again :) A daily (possibly shorter if needed) service to restart it can work.
Relevant: https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit
links?
If you’re open to putting a new OS on, there’s Linux Lite and it’s quite nice. It comes with Firefox.
Minimum Requirements:
- 1.5 Ghz Dual Core Processor
- 4GB Memory
- 40GB HDD/SSD/NVME
- VGA, DVI, DP or HDMI screen capable of 1366x768 resolution
- DVD drive or USB port for the ISO image
- Disable Secure Boot
Maybe something intended for weak hardware and older versions of Windows:
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
A Linux install with something lightweight like XFCE for desktop environment would do better probably.
supermium is slower than normal chromium because they redirect certain system calls to some external dll that causes overhead iirc
Waterfox.
Try https://www.palemoon.org/, it’s a fork of Firefox from a few years ago before it got big.
Before it got big? It was recommended to me by not a very tech savvy person maybe around 20 years ago now. To give you some perspective around the time frame, it would have been a couple years later when I bought a 2gb Windows 7 netbook that actually ran borderlands, and got into the Google ecosystem.
