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The Lighter browser....or a text one??

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dafunk
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The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#1 Post by dafunk »

Hi, my current browser is Firefox and I'm on debian jessie...but I'm looking for a lighter browser so I'v done some search and that's what I found:

Firefox Light: seems a lighter version of Firefox but attached to an old version
Xombrero: cool but no more updated
midori: not updated. discontinued
Qutebrowser: not available for debian jessie
Elinks: cool but you can't surf web without a flash or open a video (sadly)

Opera and Chrome are excluded cause I'm not a google's fan...

So do you have some ideas??...I'm searching for a light updated browser and dreaming for the best it would be a text browser with videos integration (maybe play videos with mpv??)...a simply download manager and...maybe too much to ask....an equivalent of live http headers (firefox exstension) all in one......obviously an ad block...:-)........I know maybe it doesn't exist but maybe someone knows... :wink:

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pylkko
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#2 Post by pylkko »

there is a massive thread on this issue on this forum with everyone's and their sister's and dog's favorite light weight browsers. you might get some ideas from that?

dafunk
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#3 Post by dafunk »

@pylkko: could you paste the link of the thread?


dafunk
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#5 Post by dafunk »

@GarryRicketson: most of the thread in the search are from 2010 and back....not so updated...other don't focus on light but on top browser or the fastest...and there isn't any text browser recent discussion....not so positive result....maybe we can try to have an update thread discussion....

for what I read:
uzbl: not useful (miss bookmarks management and cookies support...so on)
seamonkey:firefox fork
palemoon: I'll give a try and let you know...

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GarryRicketson
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#6 Post by GarryRicketson »

Well, for text browser, I use "Links", it is very light weight. W3m also,
Every body has different needs, and what they like. Obviously a text browser will be lighter then a full browser.
But any browser, that is for watching videos, youtube, etc, well they all
are bloated, I just live with out the videos.

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pylkko
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#7 Post by pylkko »

Try searching 'lightweight browser for older PC ' from August 2017

The thread was bumped after that, but few responses... people might be tired of the topic

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bw123
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#8 Post by bw123 »

most of the thread in the search are from 2010 and back....not so updated..
nothing much different, they get bigger and now they have browers that can feed the dog while you shop.
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stevepusser
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#9 Post by stevepusser »

You might be pleasantly surprised by Qupzilla. The Stretch version is getting old, but 64-bit users can use their AppImage instead. I'll try a backport of 2.2.1 on Stretch.

Slimfast is Chrome-based, but has the Google stuff cut out for the most part and still provides a 32-bit build.

Firefox 57 also says it's faster and lighter, and users say that is true in their testing.
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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#10 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

stevepusser wrote:Firefox 57 also says it's faster and lighter, and users say that is true in their testing.
I'm using that at the moment (in Arch) and it does indeed seem much faster, it may be even better than Chrom{e,ium} now (no benchmarks though).

The only problem is that it now looks like Microsoft's Edge browser :(
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#11 Post by stevepusser »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:
stevepusser wrote:Firefox 57 also says it's faster and lighter, and users say that is true in their testing.
I'm using that at the moment (in Arch) and it does indeed seem much faster, it may be even better than Chrom{e,ium} now (no benchmarks though).

The only problem is that it now looks like Microsoft's Edge browser :(
I'm using it too, but I had a custom persona anyway, so didn't see much change except for the icons. I see they changed the "about:mozilla" creepy message for this release, too.

Qupzilla 2.2.X requires Qt (>= 5.8), so a backport is right out for Stretch. The AppImage should be fine for 64-bit, though.
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debiman
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#12 Post by debiman »

i'll just throw in one more for seamonkey (historically much more than a firefox fork).
after using palemoon for a while, seamonkey seems the better choice for me.

if you want to avoid the googleplex, but still want a full-featured gui, choices are slim.

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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#13 Post by Nili »

Hi! You may consider NetSurf. When I tried it used only 50MB RAM with one tab open, 100MB with 10+. You can install it via Debian Packages

Code: Select all

 sudo apt-get install netsurf-gtk --no-install-recommends
Regarding cli browser, w3m + w3m-img the right choice aswell.

Regards!
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GarryRicketson
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#14 Post by GarryRicketson »

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/dillo
Package: dillo (3.0.5-3)
Small and fast web browser

Dillo 3 is a graphical multi-platform web browser known for its speed and small footprint. It is based on version 1.3 of the Fast and Light Toolkit (FLTK) in version 1.3

It aims to be small in resources, stable, developer-friendly, usable, very fast, and extensible.

To run the included dillo-install-hyphenation script the recommended perl packages need to be installed.

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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#15 Post by Bulkley »

For years I ran Dillo as a file browser. It was great for that. Yes, it was fast.


Browser speed is directly related to features. The more features the slower it will be.

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debiman
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#16 Post by debiman »

^ this.

netsurf and dillo are great projects!

but they never render styled web pages the way they're supposed to look (from the designer's point of view).
in many cases this also distorts the content of the pages, or even makes it invisible/unreadable.

it is sad. i wish the internet would get simpler, not more complex.
because in the end, it's not the browser that is bloated, it's the www itself, and any browser that wants to keep up with that ultimately cannot be very lightweight.
even palemoon is medium-weight at best.
and those so-called minimal browsers like e.g. qutebrowser, are really minimalistic frontends to a full-featured browser engine (webkit in this case).
the engine itself is not minimalistic or lightweight.
cannot be, because of the www of 2017.

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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#17 Post by Bloom »

Two others you could try: Xombrero and Midori. They are both in Debian's default repositories. In my opinion, Midori works the best.

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IzayoiFlandre
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#18 Post by IzayoiFlandre »

I don't think there's really going to be a lightweight browser that will work with the majority of popular content on the Web. Simple fact is, a lot of these websites are bloated to death with JS, advertising, AJAX and other things that just generally cause things to be awful for low-end machines. If you're not really a fan of the mainstream social media, then it would be fine, but for your average, everyday user, lightweight browsers don't really work that well, sadly. :(

@Bloom: Midori has been discontinued since 2015 and nothing has been posted on their blog since around March last year or so.
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debiman
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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#19 Post by debiman »

Bloom wrote:Two others you could try: Xombrero and Midori. They are both in Debian's default repositories. In my opinion, Midori works the best.
those are both examples of the minimal frontend to a not-so-minimal backend (iirc incarnations of webkit in both cases). (and i think both are currently unmaintained?)

that's where netsurf and dillo are so different - they use a different, much lighter web rendering engine.

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Re: The Lighter browser....or a text one??

#20 Post by Bulkley »

debiman wrote:i wish the internet would get simpler, not more complex.
because in the end, it's not the browser that is bloated, it's the www itself, and any browser that wants to keep up with that ultimately cannot be very lightweight.
Agreed. When I think of how fast I could surf around the world using Gopher over a dial up modem . . . :roll:

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