Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
I run a 2012-ish Macbook Pro which has 8gb of ram. I noticed today that Chrome takes up at least a couple of those gigs throughout the day. I'm looking for suggestions for alternatives, preferably extremely lightweight (memory efficient) and open-source. Would love to hear what the community is using.
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[ 508 ms ] story [ 1386 ms ] threadhttps://www.falkon.org/
http://links.twibright.com/
There's only two other engines left: firefox and webkit. You may want to look into a webkit based browser?
Edge has become my backup quick test of "is it something in Brave breaking it"
I have Firefox open at all times as well, but find myself using it the least of the three.
You could turn the ad blocker off, and still get paid to use Brave though, if you like ads.
Also, get Firefox.
For the vast majority of news websites, running without js is a huge improvement to both performance and user experience. It even gets around a lot of paywalls.
I don’t think the sites that run slowly would be helped by a “lightweight” browser, since it’s not the browser itself that’s slowing things down, but the website. The only way to fix this is to remove those features from the website, whether that’s by disabling them, or using a browser that doesn’t support those features (eg a text-only browser).
One extension to rule them all!
Sadly I don't think you can have the full web experience without sacrificing a couple gigs of ram if you have several tabs open at once.
I know it's not open source but on a Macbook I would expect Safari to be the lightest browser.
If you really want open and still like Chrome, you could try ungoogled chromium here : https://chromium.woolyss.com/
Give it a try. There is also the great suspender for Chrome.
Some are, yes, and when your browser is eating a lot of memory, it's usually the website's fault.
But there are many sites out there that are quite lightweight (including this one). On the laptop I'm writing this on, I currently have 31 tabs open in Firefox on Linux (not counting tabs that are just viewing PDF files, only tabs that are on actual websites) and the browser's memory resident set size is less than 700 MB.
8GB really isn't that much memory at all when it comes to the resource hogging that is occuring at every level of the stack. Win 10 is using like 4GB RAM at idle these days and one Youtube tab takes the other 4 :)
after a few minutes inactive tabs gets killed - works for me very well - you can also exclude sites.
I know this isn't what you asked, but if I wanted to reinvigorate a 2012 Macbook Pro I would look install something like Lubuntu on it, which focuses on being lightweight, and would run Falkon or Midori.
You may have noticed that this was pretty much exactly what I was talking about ;) Usability issues aside, nobody fixed their stuff until Google threatened their SEO.
It also means I am less likely to share an AMP link.
Not completely unlike Apples handling of flash.
... and then cripple JavaScript so everyone has to use the built-in features and can't get "cute" at the user's expense.
But no, instead we're burning enormous quantities of person-hours doing the same damn thing over and over with bad tools and creatively-broken a11y support and shitty custom animations no-one wants, and wasting huge amounts of energy and users' time.
It also brings some really neat new features, and I find it mind boggling that Google never brought them to chrome.
I have been using it as my primary for a few months now, and I miss nothing.
disclaimer: I am affiliated with MSFT, but don't know anyone in the browser team and readily shit on other MSFT efforts that don't quite work.
If you don't already have an SSD in this device I recommend you swap that out also.
I would like to echo the recommendation for Firefox + uBlock Origin - you will see big improvements in perceived performance.
(typing this on my 2011 MacBook Pro in FF)
I've upgraded multiple 2011/2012 Unibody MBP for friends and family with 16gb ram and a 512gb ssd for about $150 in the past few years, it makes the machine feel completely new and "snappy".
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
I'm only half way joking.
The best on the performance/ui-jank scale was Surf, by a long shot. In fact it was best on both counts. I can't remember which was which but one of the three was noticeably much heavier than the other two, taking a long time to load and sometimes having slow paints, and the other had a lot of weird UI issues that might have been ironed out by running under an all-the-bells-and-whistles DE (KDE or Gnome) which tend to helpfully fix all the UI problems they introduce, but if you're really resource-constrained there's no way you can afford to run either of those (especially Gnome).
Surf's very shortcut-focused in its UI so there's a bit of memorization needed, and you may want to compile it with a few patches for convenience, but its performance and rendering were, in the field of low-resource browsers, outstanding.
[reads post more carefully] Oh you're on Mac and have 8GB of memory? Just use Safari, it makes way, way better use of resources than Chrome or Firefox. Seriously, it's way better, at the cost of having worse extensions, but you're gonna give those up on any other low-resource option anyway. Also stop using the webapp versions of crapware like Gmail if you're going to leave it open all the time—use native mail clients or the "basic HTML" version. Keep your "webapps" in their own windows and close them when not in use, they all eat shitloads of memory for no good reason, no matter the browser.