I don't think there are any mean-and-lean browsers anymore that actually work well. All the main browser makers are going down the bloat-bloat-bloat pathway. I abandoned Firefox in disgust. Chrome *might* a bit better resource-wise.

Pale Moon has been my default browser for several months now. If you liked the older versions of Firefox you might like Pale Moon.

https://www.palemoon.org/

I also use, on occasion, Vivaldi, but it is another chrome clone and I don't trust google, or even Vivaldi. OTOH, Vivaldi does seem to be faster than any of the other browsers I've tried in the last year or so.

Or use Firefox ESR from your package manager or https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/.

FWIW I switched from PaleMoon to WaterFox, and for reasons unknown to me, WaterFox seems to be quite a bit faster. They are both resource pigs, though.

Did you try Pale Moon yet?

Hallo, David.

My goodness, you're getting plenty of replies to this one.....

I have to agree with Ook. Out of all the apps that most of us use on a day-to-day basis, a decent web-browser probably comes pretty close to the top of the list. We all want the features, but we don't want the bloat.

Unfortunately, the two simply don't go hand in hand any longer. Because of the development of web-sites, which are getting hungrier & hungrier for our RAM, you either get a full-featured, 'bloated' browser (300+ MB installed), or you go for lean'n'mean (which means you lose out on a lot of functionality).

I've been a Chrome man ever since the very first beta-quality, pre-release assessment version was released, way back in the Autumn of 2008. Prior to that I, too, was a FireFox user (in Windoze, at that time); anything was better than Internet Exploder. But I soon tired of FF's constant crashes at the slightest provocation; I wanted something fast, lightweight, and reliable.....and Chrome fitted the bill.

Times move on, however, and Chrome (indeed, all major browsers) has 'morphed' into a lumbering supertanker of a thing. More than anything else due to all the extra security stuff that's been incorporated into it. It still uses a fair amount of RAM, though in nothing like the way it used to be; Google have been making serious efforts to address that particular issue, and in large part, they've succeeded.

In one of my older Puppies, I run an ancient version of Chrome (version 26), because it's the most recent that 'Lucid' Puppy's elderly glibc will support. It no longer gets support from Google, I can't sync my bookmarks any more, and I can no longer access the Chrome Web Store. But I can live with all that because, Oh! it's so fast & responsive... It reminds me of why I fell in love with Chrome in the first place. It's Chrome the way it used to be.....before the 'bloat' crept in.

Virtually all modern browsers are based on either Chrome or FireFox. (Unless you use something like the old QtWeb; WebKit-based, fast as hell, and very lightweight, but.....it hasn't had any development for at least 4 years. And it has 'issues' with site certificates, too...)

-------------------------------------------------

Anyway; for your situation, I will second the recommendations for PaleMoon. It's the default browser in several modern Puppies (which always look to run lightweight apps'n'stuff), and, compared to FF itself, appears to be quite stable.

Give it a try. I think you might be quite impressed. I'll also second SlimJet; a Chromium 'clone' with tabs reminiscent of the old FireFox (square, rather than sloped). It's had full Adblocking functionality built-in for years.....and does seem somewhat 'lighter', and more responsive than Chrome itself. I use this a fair bit nowadays.

Hope some of that helps.


Mike.

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I've just had to migrate that laptop to Xubuntu, now that Salix doesn't support non-pae processors any more. What a difference

It's a question of what you can get for Ubuntu. There's supposed to be a PPA (what ever that is) for Midori, but I ended up having to lift a package out of the Debian repository. That's the best so far. Using ps,
Firefox 7% CPU, 15% RAM
Vivaldi 6% CPU, 9% RAM
Midori 4% CPU, 4% RAM

Qupzilla was broken and I discovered that the problem with Netsurf was not a bug: it just lacks Javascript.

I'll try PaleMoon, if I can get a usable copy for Xubuntu.

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That is what I am using it on. Only for Faceplant so far, as Faceplant on Firefox freezes my desktop (which badly needs replacement.)

I've just installed PaleMoon and it's not really lightweight:
%cpu 10 %mem 7

Looking at Youtube performance, there's no visible difference between the four I've tried, but Firefox is slowest to start and Vivaldi has an odd habit of jumping to the start page.