Lightweight browser

Need your help good people,

I'm looking for a lightweight, small footprint web browser. My laptop is aging considerably and I need to be able to pack a web browser (mostly for offline reading, but also online), SlickEdit, TakeCommand console, notepad++, SQLite Maestro and eventually other small apps without consuming all my memory.

Of all those, the least efficient is no doubt the web browser. With a memory footprint around 50Mb, Firefox is excellent, but unnecessary when I just need to do small-time websurfing and consulting offline pages. I would love something around the 10Mb mark.

I'm looking for them over the web, but if you know of a good one beforehand, I would appreciate if you shared.

EDIT: for windows

But there's so many...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

You could always use Lynx :)

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Originally Posted by Salem

You could always use Lynx :)

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Dos the download come with a cyanide pill coupon.

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Originally Posted by Salem

You could always use Lynx :)

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You aren't far. And it loads GNU, Boost, C++ Reference, C++ FAQ, and many of the websites saved on disk (which are mainly text) just perfectly.

I'll probably be sticking with K-Meleon for now until I find something even better. K-Meleon is now on this exact forum webpage and it is consuming 30Mb less memory (21Mb over 52 from firefox). And it is built on top of the Gecko engine as firefox. So that's a big bonus.

There was this one (not on that wiki list) that gave me a 15Mb footprint after rendering and displaying CBoards. M9 Surfer. But it was horrible. The URL on the address bar changed according to what was being loaded. After rendering I would be left with CBoards home page but with the URL in the address bar pointing to one of the ads.

Firefox source code + big hack and slash to remove all the guff you don't need to give you a nice sleek browser all of your own :)

Yay, Firecub is born :D

I knew I shouldn't have searched for "firecub" on google :eek:

You're right. You shouldn't have. And you shouldn't have posted about it. :(

Guess where I'll totally NOT be Saturday night?

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Originally Posted by Mario F.

I knew I shouldn't have searched for "firecub" on google :eek:

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Curiosity killed the cub :(

Oh yeah, and to get back on-topic, I think the best browser is the one you make yourself... (come on Mario, with those wicked C++ skills, stripping down Firefox should be a piece of cake!)

>> (come on Mario, with those wicked C++ skills, stripping down Firefox should be a piece of cake!)

Let me fill in Mario's response for that:

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Originally Posted by future Mario. F

I know next to nothing about programming

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:)

I know next to nothing about programing

EDIT: Wicked C++ skills, stripping down firefox, making my own browser... that was so funny

How's about this?
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

In fact, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox and scroll down to "Portable versions"

I use that regardless of whether I'm running Firefox off a USB drive or on my computer. I mean, just copy the entire Profiles folder and you've got your own complete browser prefs + plugins + themes + sessions that you can just drop into any other copy on any computer.

Ok, let's quote some random guy here:

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Originally Posted by some random guy

"Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla."

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[?]

Yep. I got the portable version. Fits into the type of web browsing I do these days. When the need arises, the full version is also there at a couple of clicks away.

I would have suggested Dillo if you don't want all the bloat that is getting onto websites.
it uses the same rendering engine as lynx, so no css support, no images, tables, frames, javascript, flash....

but very small footprint and far FASTER than any bloated graphics rendering browser.
and Dillo is a full GUI browser.

I would recommend Opera. It is smaller than firefox, faster, more efficient (from my experience at least; it's certainly not less efficient), is just as if not more standards compliant, and still manages to pack in more features out of the box.

Opera is decent, and has a smaller memory footprint, that's true. (A friend on mine actually refuses Firefox in favour of Opera on his grandfather box.) But I do wonder how them Opera users survive without all the great plugins :rolleyes:

It's because Opera has so many more features to begin with, most of which require plugins in firefox (see http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/...fox-extensions and http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/...-extensions-ii )

Sorry, but Opera doesn't quiet fit in the lightweight browser category. Certainly not in the 10-15 Mb footprint one.

A fresh Opera 9.02 install takes up a little more than 5 megabytes (5.33 on my disk, to be exact).

I think Mario is talking about the runtime memory usage. I mean, disk space is cheap these days...

It's possible to tweak Firefox to stop caching pages, multi-pipeline downloads etc. and there's this nifty addition to the config that has Firefox strip down to sometimes < 10MB of memory usage when minimized. If you have a decent amount of runtime memory for Firefox saaay 30+ MB this could be the way to go.

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It's because Opera has so many more features to begin with

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Wow, I didn't know it has a built-in XHTML debugger, download accelerator, music player, FTP client, GMail virtual drive client, HTTP header viewer, world map plotter... Opera must be waay more bloated than I thought! :rolleyes:

You could try hack the Firefox source to make it cache stuff to disk or something, heh. Or refuse to cache certain stuff at all. It will probably save 80% on memory usage... and increase CPU/bandwidth usage by 5+X :eek: Well it's your choice. Can't you upgrade the RAM chip or something? Granted, notebook stuff ain't cheap, but this would seem to me a worthy investment if you're intent on extending the useful life of your computer as long as you can.

Well not everyone in the world needs a bajillion features in the browser; I wasn't aware a 'world map plotter' was so incredibly essential in software meant to browse the internet.

And on the topic of bloat/efficiency, I've always found firefox to be much more of a memory/cpu hog than Opera. When my laptop was still clogged with dust, for instance (long story; point is it ran slow and overheated easily), Opera was the only browser that didn't start to freeze up to the point of unusability in < 5 minutes, hence why I switched in the first place (I seriously was an avid firefox user until I simply couldn't not use it any more).

I'm not saying firefox is a bad browser, it would just be one of my last choices on a slow/old computer.

> And on the topic of bloat/efficiency, I've always found firefox to be much more of a memory/cpu hog than Opera.

You found wrong.

Both Opera and Firefox uses roughly the same amount of memory. So stop your little browser war, already. That's not the purpose of this thread and I have little to no patience for that kind of peep talk. Sheesh! How many years listening to this crap, now?

I wanted a low end browser to run along side other open applications on an aged laptop with 500 Mb of RAM. Disk space was not a concern. Memory usage was. And I found one.

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an aged laptop with 500 Mb of RAM

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You're lucky... Think I should get a try to it... 'cause the previous choice - K-Meleon could not bit the Explorer in one window browsing (That's what I'm doing most of the time on my home laptop with 256M memory)...

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Originally Posted by vart

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an aged laptop with 500 Mb of RAM

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You're lucky... Think I should get a try to it... 'cause the previous choice - K-Meleon could not bit the Explorer in one window browsing (That's what I'm doing most of the time on my home laptop with 256M memory)...

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Whoa! Damn. I recently (to me) upgraded from my PC from 128 to 3xx.

I guess that video editing seems a bit foolish. :(