I was not intending this to be a plug for IE at all. By all means give IE8 a try if the idea of a lightweight browser excites you.
I was just answering the question as to what the lightest weight browser is.
Could try Firefox Portable, and run it from a memory stick?
Or you could try - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0a2/releasenotes/ Which is a new 'mobile' version of firefox. Not exactly sure on its uses.
90% of IE is already loaded into memory for use by Explorer and many third party applications that use it for rendering a HTML GUI.
Obviously it's not quite as simple as that but even by comparing from a conventional point of view... IE still strikes me as the lightest weight. Opera is a heavy weight. It has all sorts of crap built into it. Firefox is somewhere between the light to middle weight. Both of these browsers support all manner of extensions/addon systems that are highly proprietary. Whereas IE simply supports ActiveX control addons and the foundations for this are already built into the OS.
In fact if anyone knows why I might be having these problems with FF, please let me know. Reinstall hasn't helped.
And ActiveX isn't proprietary?
Anyway, IE being built into the OS doesn't necessarily make it lightweight, and nor does Opera having lots of features make it heavyweight. Yes, the IE program code will use less memory than Opera, but Opera might have a more efficient engine which can render pages using less memory and CPU time than IE. In that case Opera would be more lightweight once you had a few tabs open.
No... having an e-mail, IRC, MSN/Yahoo and a BitTorrent client built into Opera definately makes it a heavyweight. And that's before we even look at its rendering engine.
ActiveX is built into the OS. It's always loaded, ready and waiting. It is not a technology specific to IE. That's not to say it's brilliant or anything because it isn't, IMO it's crap. But the subject is all about lightweight not weeing contests about who thinks which browser is best. Because if you plotted lightweight browser versus best browser on a graph they would not correlate.
You don't need to strain and think up weird and wonderful ways to try to portray Opera as lightweight. It just isn't. Pretty much everyone knows it isn't. Even Opera themselves I would hope. But that's not to say it's a bad browser. Many people like the "all in one" experience.
Did you try creating a new profile as well as
reinstalling the app? In my experience Firefox has fewer rendering oddities than Opera.
I wish they'd make the bitorrent and email elements optional
There's instructions here.
It is optional. Well you can dl torrents from your fave client instead of with Opera if you wish. May be that's no what you mean though...
Yeah, I wasn't very clear there. I meant optional on installation.