LinuxQuestions.org - Looking for a light on battery browser

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Looking for a light on battery browser

Hi all,

All is in the title.
Powertop is showing chromium as a great battery drainer for me (I usually have about 15 tabs constantly opened).

I first thought that it did not matter while doing something else.

I'm looking for an alternative that I could use on laptop, even with less functionalities, while on battery.

I've got luakit but can't tell if it worths learning the special way of functioning

First thought - don't have 15 tabs open?

Secondly, I don't know about battery power, but you could try the following out as alternatives. You could try Vivaldi for something modern, quick and that can make mincemeat of any site.

If you want something lighter, use Qupzilla, or give Falkon a bash. Both require qt5 [use 5.9.7 for Falkon].

I use Qupzilla on my netbook. if you decide to go with it, I would personally go with build 2.1.2 since 2.2.6 is a bit more bloated.

EDIT: It seems Qupzilla has now been removed from SBo and replaced with Falkon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lysander666 (Post 5938092)

First thought - don't have 15 tabs open?

:-D :-D :-D
Already had that in mind but trying to avoid!

I'll try Falkon and Vivaldi, thanks for your suggestion

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tonus (Post 5938089)

...Powertop is showing chromium as a great battery drainer for me (I usually have about 15 tabs constantly opened)...

Before switching browsers, you might wanna try OneTab extension.

Looking for a light on battery browser

Thanks for this onetab suggestion, I think it will be my first try!

I second Vivaldi; it's a nice job of work.

If you want to try a text browser, I highly recommend w3m. It can handle tabs and display images.

How does one define, light?
:)
I've have Vivaldi open and doing absolutely nothing and it is using over 700 megs of RAM. Fire up widevine and Netflix and it climbs up over 1 gig.
Removing the wallpaper saves about 70 megs.

KDE terminal + Lynx

I don't think that it gets much lighter than that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skaendo (Post 5938458)

KDE terminal + Lynx

I don't think that it gets much lighter than that.

Well, Lynx and xfce-terminal together are using 42MB of RAM and I don't think the power is being tested much either! Usability is another matter.

Blink/Chromium based browsers are a bit heavier on older or under-powered hardware, they prioritize performance and responsiveness, both in page rendering and in UX. In other words, they are not shy about using up your hardware resources. On newer/faster hardware it's not noticeable.

You might give Pale Moon a go, it's more traditional and a bit controversial because of the developers. There's quite a long thread about Pale Moon here:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ox-4175605599/

Also, latest Firefox ESR (compiled directly from Pat, in 'xap' pkg group) can be made quite lightweight with some tweaks and settings.

Quote:

Originally Posted by birdboy (Post 5938674)

The data in my previous message was done with fairly new hardware, but while running the task manager last night on Vivaldi, I compared Pale Moon (my main browser) and Firefox. I should have jotted it down, but Pale Moon used less RAM than Firefox and Firefox used less than Vivaldi. it was so was something like Vivaldi used 700+ megs of ram, Pale Moon used 208 and Firefox-esr used 272, all while idle, no pages loaded.

Here's current state on my system:

Code:

 Private  +  Shared  =  RAM used        Program



136.0 KiB +  23.5 KiB = 159.5 KiB        enchive

124.0 KiB +  57.5 KiB = 181.5 KiB        klogd

140.0 KiB +  63.5 KiB = 203.5 KiB        init

176.0 KiB +  74.5 KiB = 250.5 KiB        syslogd

172.0 KiB + 109.5 KiB = 281.5 KiB        crond

236.0 KiB + 123.5 KiB = 359.5 KiB        xinit

204.0 KiB + 173.5 KiB = 377.5 KiB        ntimed

284.0 KiB + 140.5 KiB = 424.5 KiB        xbanish

736.0 KiB + 665.5 KiB =  1.4 MiB        oksh (3)

844.0 KiB + 705.5 KiB =  1.5 MiB        master

  1.5 MiB +  73.5 KiB =  1.6 MiB        smartd

  1.6 MiB + 625.5 KiB =  2.2 MiB        cwm

  2.2 MiB +  76.5 KiB =  2.3 MiB        udevd

856.0 KiB +  1.5 MiB =  2.4 MiB        pickup

956.0 KiB +  1.6 MiB =  2.5 MiB        qmgr

  4.8 MiB + 247.5 KiB =  5.1 MiB        rxvtd

 41.3 MiB +  11.1 MiB =  52.5 MiB        Xorg

289.1 MiB +  16.3 MiB = 305.4 MiB        palemoon

373.9 MiB + 148.7 MiB = 522.7 MiB        firefox (6)

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

                        901.6 MiB

=================================

This is with the same tabs loaded in both browsers: This LQ page (while logged in), Hacker News, Lobsters and reddit.com/r/linux (heavy on JS).

When only one tab is loaded, they are both similar and below 300 MB (around 250 if memory serves). Firefox is multi process (and OpenGL accelerated) with process limit (ipc) set to 8 (stock is 4 if I recall). Pale Moon is just one process. So Firefox grows larger and quicker but is more performant on my hardware. Pale Moon is not bad either, with forced OpenGL acceleration.

I've used this script for memory info:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pi...ster/ps_mem.py

Here's with Ungoogled Chromium:

Code:

 Private  +  Shared  =  RAM used        Program



124.0 KiB +  52.5 KiB = 176.5 KiB        klogd

140.0 KiB +  58.5 KiB = 198.5 KiB        init

176.0 KiB +  71.5 KiB = 247.5 KiB        syslogd

188.0 KiB +  85.0 KiB = 273.0 KiB        enchive (2)

176.0 KiB + 108.5 KiB = 284.5 KiB        crond

204.0 KiB + 171.5 KiB = 375.5 KiB        ntimed

236.0 KiB + 153.5 KiB = 389.5 KiB        xinit

284.0 KiB + 166.5 KiB = 450.5 KiB        xbanish

844.0 KiB + 663.5 KiB =  1.5 MiB        master

  1.5 MiB +  90.5 KiB =  1.6 MiB        smartd

944.0 KiB + 752.0 KiB =  1.7 MiB        oksh (4)

856.0 KiB +  1.5 MiB =  2.3 MiB        pickup

  2.2 MiB +  74.5 KiB =  2.3 MiB        udevd

940.0 KiB +  1.5 MiB =  2.4 MiB        qmgr

  1.6 MiB +  1.2 MiB =  2.8 MiB        cwm

  4.3 MiB + 317.5 KiB =  4.6 MiB        rxvtd

 40.6 MiB +  16.9 MiB =  57.5 MiB        Xorg

260.9 MiB + 117.7 MiB = 378.7 MiB        chrome (10)

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

                        457.6 MiB

=================================

On my system, (Ungoogled) Chromium works best, both in terms of resources and in performance.

I don't use any browser plugins and I enable quite a bit of flags for hardware acceleration, security etc. I also always run in Incognito mode and have Pi-hole on the LAN as system-wide DNS.

In regular settings, basically everything is disabled, plus I have the following flags activated (via chrome://flags):

Code:

chrome --incognito --flag-switches-begin --no-pings --disable-search-engine-collection --blink-settings=disallowFetchForDocWrittenScriptsInMainFrame=true --enable-fast-unload --enable-gpu-rasterization --history-entry-requires-user-gesture --enable-oop-rasterization --use-simple-cache-backend=on --site-per-process --enable-tcp-fastopen --enable-zero-copy --fingerprinting-canvas-image-data-noise --fingerprinting-canvas-measuretext-noise --fingerprinting-client-rects-noise --force-punycode-hostnames --ignore-gpu-blacklist --reduced-referrer-granularity --disable-smooth-scrolling --top-chrome-md=material --enable-features=UseSurfaceLayerForVideo,UseSurfaceLayerForVideoMS,VizDisplayCompositor --flag-switches-end

chrome://gpu shows the following:

Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Hardware accelerated
Flash: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
Compositing: Hardware accelerated
Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
Out-of-process Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
Hardware Protected Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
Skia Deferred Display List: Disabled
Skia Renderer: Disabled
Surface Synchronization: Enabled
Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
Viz Service Display Compositor: Enabled
WebGL: Hardware accelerated
WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

This is on RX 560. Same thing is with Nvidia, too (works the same).

As much as I'm anti Google, and anti monopoly regarding rendering engines, (Ungoogled) Chromium simply runs miles ahead around other browsers, albeit Fx is getting really close and in some things even better but can never match the overall feel.

Upcoming WebRender from Mozilla is also interesting and already works fine for me in day to day use when I decide to enable it (with some minor glitches here and there).

With all that being said, (unfortunately) (Ungoogled) Chromium remains to be my primary browser for now.

Chromium with one tab (replying):

Code:

 Private  +  Shared  =  RAM used        Program



136.0 KiB +  21.5 KiB = 157.5 KiB        enchive

124.0 KiB +  63.5 KiB = 187.5 KiB        klogd

140.0 KiB +  70.5 KiB = 210.5 KiB        init

176.0 KiB +  84.5 KiB = 260.5 KiB        syslogd

180.0 KiB + 124.5 KiB = 304.5 KiB        crond

236.0 KiB + 168.5 KiB = 404.5 KiB        xinit

204.0 KiB + 219.5 KiB = 423.5 KiB        ntimed

284.0 KiB + 188.5 KiB = 472.5 KiB        xbanish

720.0 KiB + 713.5 KiB =  1.4 MiB        oksh (3)

844.0 KiB + 682.5 KiB =  1.5 MiB        master

  1.5 MiB +  95.5 KiB =  1.6 MiB        smartd

  2.2 MiB +  88.5 KiB =  2.3 MiB        udevd

852.0 KiB +  1.5 MiB =  2.3 MiB        pickup

924.0 KiB +  1.5 MiB =  2.4 MiB        qmgr

  1.6 MiB +  1.2 MiB =  2.9 MiB        cwm

  4.0 MiB + 368.5 KiB =  4.4 MiB        rxvtd

 40.6 MiB +  17.0 MiB =  57.6 MiB        Xorg

150.4 MiB +  96.6 MiB = 247.0 MiB        chrome (6)

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

                        325.8 MiB

=================================