lightweight browser ?

G

game14

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 8, 2006
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any recommendations for a lightweight browser ?
Been using mostly firefox till now but since the recent updates im not really happy with it anymore. Kinda gettin bloated, slow and resource hungry lately.
Not to mention annoying huge updates all the time. Not very usefull for people with a download cap.
Something with a simple UI , favorites, history, saving websites for offline reading, resuming download manager, low on memory and cpu usage, small download size. Available for Windows and Linux. And some privacy, i dont like all my data uploaded to some company (chrome). Preferably runs as standalone app without the need to install.
Thats all i need.
Is there anything like that or do i need to keep on dreaming.
 
A newer browser called Vivaldi, still in development, is very sleek and fast. It's based on Chrome.

The one thing I don't care for is how it handles bookmarks.

Latest version
 
Firefox ESR 38.3.0 is about as fast as Firefox has ever been and will ever get, plus it cuts down on some of the bloat in the normal versions at least for oh, another 6-8 months or so before they push out ESR 45 at which point I'll stop upgrading and just stick with 38.x.x from that point on.

Maxthon is still pretty lean and mean and very responsive overall but not everybody knows about it or even cares.

There's also custom compiles of Firefox like Light (that's the name, really), pcxFirefox, and some others that cut out a lot of the bloat and try their best to make it lean and mean again. My personal recommendation would be to avoid two of them: Pale Moon and Waterfox because they both claim to be fast responsive versions of Firefox and yet they fail in most every benchmark by comparison with even the vanilla builds of Firefox that they're based upon.

Vivaldi has potential but it's taking a long time to develop but I suppose that's not really unusual since it's "late to the party" one could say.

And of course there's Chrome which is getting larger as time passes but still does have a highly responsive UI (that helps feed the placebo that it actually is faster but benchmarks put Firefox basicallly as fast and in some respects even faster in actual operation while having the noticeably slower GUI).

There's Edge as well if you're running Windows 10 which is not something I intend to do, ever, so I can't speak for that one.

Ain't much going on in the browser world anymore in terms of brand new development save for Vivaldi but that's based on Blink which is an offshoot of Webkit as I understand it (I could be and probably am wrong on that aspect) and it's done by previous Opera developers hoping to bring back the glory days I suppose.
 
thanks for the input so far.
Vivaldi sounds interesting but since its still under development...better wait and see where it goes. Need something reliable for daily use now.
Light is only half the download size of the other browsers, looks like it lost a lot of fat.
Might be worth a try.
Chrome and Egde is out of discussion.
I had Palemoon on my netbook, but the GUI is not exactly netbookscreen friendly. Kinda seems a little bit slow and unresponsive.
Did not try it under windows yet, but since tiberian already mentioned its failing in benchmarks...there might be better options.
 
game14 said:
I had Palemoon on my netbook, but the GUI is not exactly netbookscreen friendly. Kinda seems a little bit slow and unresponsive.
Did not try it under windows yet, but since tiberian already mentioned its failing in benchmarks...there might be better options.
Click to expand...

Do you use your browsers to run synthetic benchmarks or browse the web? You may find it lacking for whatever reasons, but benchmarks should be the last thing to look at when choosing a browser.

I'm currently running about 600 tabs in 7 windows with 3.2 GB RAM usage and practically idle CPU.

Whatever browser you choose in the end, it is the sites and various scripts they run that will bog down your computer, so your best bet is to run something like uBlock or NoScript.

As far as responsiveness goes, nothing beats the Opera of old. If you can try version 9 or 10 at most, you may find it very good. Not sure about site compatibility today, though.
 
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Dillo is the ultimate lightweight browser, but it doesn't meet all of the requirements you requested.
 
anybody with some input to opera ?
light doesnt work...some dll file is missing...
 
CEpeep said:
Dillo is the ultimate lightweight browser, but it doesn't meet all of the requirements you requested.
Click to expand...

yeah i know that one...dillo is lightweight but not something really up to date anymore. Too limited with an outdated UI.
 
game14 said:
anybody with some input to opera ?
light doesnt work...some dll file is missing...
Click to expand...

If Light requires a DLL it's most likely some Microsoft runtime thing, not a big hassle to fix by installing whatever it's looking for (usually one of the Visual C++ things). It's not the direct fault of Light itself, mind you. Also, by default the exe for Light is named light.exe, not firefox.exe so if you have a shortcut looking for firefox.exe that's why it will crash out - change the filename to firefox.exe if necessary.
 
Tiberian said:
If Light requires a DLL it's most likely some Microsoft runtime thing, not a big hassle to fix by installing whatever it's looking for (usually one of the Visual C++ things). It's not the direct fault of Light itself, mind you. Also, by default the exe for Light is named light.exe, not firefox.exe so if you have a shortcut looking for firefox.exe that's why it will crash out - change the filename to firefox.exe if necessary.
Click to expand...

yep one of the visualC++ runtimes is missing. Trying to get it.
 
really not much goin on in the browser market. Was trying out maxthon, opera, palemoon compared to firefox....other than the GUI not much difference at all. Nothin loads faster or slower in any of them. Can as well stay with firefox.
 
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