I have 4GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron N4000. Chrome and Edge work decently, but they always freeze at the worst possible moments. Firefox, Brave?
If you try https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/ I’ll be very interested to hear how it goes.
I’ve got an old Dell Inspiron N5010 with similar specs. Palemoon and Seamonkey both work decently, and both of them have adblock extensions available. I also agree with the recommendation to change OS if that’s a possibility, though I would NOT recommend Linux Lite; I have never found it to be very fast. I’d recommend MX Linux or antiX.
Firefox with Ublock Origin is pretty much the gold standard. But, it likely won’t do terribly better. Modern webpages are big.
You need to either Linux to get the OS RAM usage down or get another 4gb in there. Both would help a ton.
Could try blocking js. Depending on user preference.
I assumed Linux given the specs and that Chrome works at all.
Vote for firefox as you should be anyway. Another trick to try is an explicit tab unloader extension (for fine control of unloading) and/or the built in about:unloads .
All browsers seem to accumulate memory (and cpu usage) over time, sometimes you just have to shut it down and restart. (AKA have you tried turning it off and on again :) A daily (possibly shorter if needed) service to restart it can work.
Relevant: https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit
Firefox is totally doable on that much RAM. Not going to be pleasant, but usable. You want to strip down as much resource usage as you can: inside Firefox throw in uBlock Origin and Tab Unloader; outside Firefox use a stripped down desktop like XFCE or just a straight low resource window manager with no desktop environment (I was a big fan of WindowMaker back in the day).
I also run a very low end machine with 4GB ram.
The issue often isn’t the browser or even the website, exactly, it’s the tons and tons of advertising and tracking crap that is in the background of most sites nowadays.
The way around that is to run a solid ad blocker. uBlock Orgin is the best, but Google (and maybe MS? I don’t use windows) has fucked over plugins to specifically make things like it not work.
So, what you want to do is run Firefox with uBlock Origin with the more aggressive blocking settings in both uBlock and Firefox. Extra credit for setting up PiHole to block a different set of crap.
The one thing is that this will absolutely break certain sites. But fuck those sites, they’re fucking you.
I’m not going to sugar coat it but your ask might be a bit hard if you want a relatively clean browsing experience.
You’ll need a browser that can at the very least use addons for ad blocking / script blocking / browser and OS spoofing.
But if you are on Linux then the lowest resource browser will always be via the terminal but then you miss things like layout etc… :)
If you’re open to putting a new OS on, there’s Linux Lite and it’s quite nice. It comes with Firefox.
Minimum Requirements:
- 1.5 Ghz Dual Core Processor
- 4GB Memory
- 40GB HDD/SSD/NVME
- VGA, DVI, DP or HDMI screen capable of 1366x768 resolution
- DVD drive or USB port for the ISO image
- Disable Secure Boot
File browser
Maybe something intended for weak hardware and older versions of Windows:
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
A Linux install with something lightweight like XFCE for desktop environment would do better probably.
supermium is slower than normal chromium because they redirect certain system calls to some external dll that causes overhead iirc
Firefox with ublock origin
100% agree that you’ll have far better performance with a light Linux distro. If you’re having trouble running a browser, that’s 5% of what’s running with some bloated OS chugging along just to show you a desktop.
I went through same scenario a few years ago. At the time, I used Firefox with uBlock origin. Brave is chromium based, so don’t expect lower RAM usage from it.
If you’re using Linux, look into zram and zswap. The first one gave a second wind to my notebook back then.
Try https://www.palemoon.org/, it’s a fork of Firefox from a few years ago before it got big.
intente instalarlo pero me daba error, talvez lo intente en los proximos dias
Before it got big? It was recommended to me by not a very tech savvy person maybe around 20 years ago now. To give you some perspective around the time frame, it would have been a couple years later when I bought a 2gb Windows 7 netbook that actually ran borderlands, and got into the Google ecosystem.
Your timeline is pretty off.
Chrome is a fork of Konqueoror, before it got big
Waterfox.
seamonkey, but compat with many modern websites aren’t good
falkon might kinda work
people here probably hates this but if you’re on m$ windows, mypal68 and 360chrome(modded version) kinda works well on potato machines. i used to use 360chrome v86 on a atom z8350 with 2gb ram running win10 x32
