Lightweight browser??

smogsy · 25 Mar 2009 at 20:11

it is great but it still creates proccesses for each tab

nathane

Slime101 · 25 Mar 2009 at 20:13

I've now got IE8 and so far its using just half the memory of IE7 was with the same 3 tabs open. Nice

NathanE · 25 Mar 2009 at 20:16

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.

Ross1234 · 25 Mar 2009 at 20:17

NathanE said:
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.

Well my laptop is fairly slow, and it is working great. Im sticking with firefox on my faster PC.

Kennysevenfold · 25 Mar 2009 at 20:17

swinnie said:
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.

This.!

Kua · 26 Mar 2009 at 01:16

I use Opera, just because FF consistently fails to render sites properly. I prefer the FF bookmark manager and I miss the extensions, oh and there are certain operations which Opera can't perform and it gets dismissed by a few web designers. But apart from that its fine

.

In fact if anyone knows why I might be having these problems with FF, please let me know. Reinstall hasn't helped.

Mattus · 26 Mar 2009 at 02:24

NathanE said:
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.

And ActiveX isn't proprietary? :confused:

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.

Kua said:
In fact if anyone knows why I might be having these problems with FF, please let me know. Reinstall hasn't helped.

Did you try creating a new profile as well as reinstalling the app? In my experience Firefox has fewer rendering oddities than Opera.

snowdog · 26 Mar 2009 at 02:58

Ie6 is the lowest on res.

Ie7 is a massive hog, 1 window uses well over 600mb when you have 5+ tabs open, and some of em happen to include a lot of pictures ( eg. high res screenshot thread); this is with 3 iexplorer windows open, 2 windows with 3 tabs and 1 window with 4 tabs:

Firefox isn't that well either, haven't checked chrome or opera for ram usage. But on the p3 lappy with 192mb ram nothing really works smoothly except ie6.

Aod · 26 Mar 2009 at 07:03

opera's ram usage is higher than any other browser i know because it caches everything you view untill it's closed. by default, it's maximum cache size is based on how much ram your system has, but it's usually a lot.

opera is NOT a lightweight browser.

NathanE · 26 Mar 2009 at 07:56

Mattus said:
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.

Kua · 26 Mar 2009 at 13:19

Mattus said:
Did you try creating a new profile as well as
reinstalling the app? In my experience Firefox has fewer rendering oddities than Opera.

Yeah I can't imagine its a common problem. I actually have the same issue with IE. Like I say reinstall didnt help. When version 3 came out it helped a little but still isn't right. Not sure what you mean by create new profile but I'll google around.

Ratbag · 26 Mar 2009 at 18:11

It all depends on how we define lightweight I guess.....

If speed and responsiveness are a factor then for me the winner is Chrome (more specifically, Iron, as I'm no fan of Googles privacy policy). Starts up fastest and renders pretty much as quick as anything else. Creates a new process per tab, each process for me about 15MB.

I feel I must step in to defend my browser of choice - Opera. It has heavyweight features (too many IMO, I wish they'd make the bitorrent and email elements optional), but it is faster to open up than FF and IE and is generally fast and responsive to use. It can consume a lot of RAM but as Aod points out, it caches everything until you close it (though you can choose the size of the memory cache). And its not quite as bloated as some people would have us believe - currently 1 process, 7 tabs, 100MB used.

tolien · 26 Mar 2009 at 18:41

Kua said:
Not sure what you mean by create new profile but I'll google around.

There's instructions here.

Kua · 26 Mar 2009 at 20:12

Ratbag said:
I wish they'd make the bitorrent and email elements optional

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...

Kua · 26 Mar 2009 at 20:13

tolien said:
There's instructions here.

Cheers!

Ratbag · 26 Mar 2009 at 21:57

Kua said:
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.

Kua · 26 Mar 2009 at 22:15

Ratbag said:
Yeah, I wasn't very clear there. I meant optional on installation.

Well that would be nice. Not many software developers allow such control >.>

GSDog · 27 Mar 2009 at 00:59

I just installed IE8 on my Netbook and it's a lot quicker than Firefox. I've now uninstalled Firefox and I am using IE8.

It keeps crashing on my desktop PC though so I'll be sticking with Firefox on my main PC unless I can get it fixed.

Is there a decent adblocker for IE8? I will really miss using Adblock Plus.

Ratbag · 28 Mar 2009 at 19:58

GSDog said:
I just installed IE8 on my Netbook and it's a lot quicker than Firefox. I've now uninstalled Firefox and I am using IE8.

It keeps crashing on my desktop PC though so I'll be sticking with Firefox on my main PC unless I can get it fixed.

Is there a decent adblocker for IE8? I will really miss using Adblock Plus.

Try IE7PRO. I believe it works with IE8 too. It adds all manner of Firefox-esque bits to IE, including Adblock.

Kua · 4 Apr 2009 at 17:31

tolien said:
There's instructions here.

Somewhat delayed, but initial impressions show that creating a new profile was the solution to Firefox not rendering web pages properly. Thanks again.