LinuxQuestions.org - Looking for a light on battery browser

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Tonus

12-17-2018 04:12 AM

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

Lysander666

12-17-2018 04:30 AM

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.

Tonus

12-17-2018 07:45 AM

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

dr.s	12-17-2018 08:51 AM

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.

Tonus

12-17-2018 09:23 AM

Looking for a light on battery browser

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

frankbell

12-17-2018 08:16 PM

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.

cwizardone

12-17-2018 09:35 PM

1 Attachment(s)

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.

Skaendo

12-17-2018 11:44 PM

KDE terminal + Lynx

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

Lysander666

12-18-2018 10:49 AM

1 Attachment(s)

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.

birdboy

12-18-2018 11:03 AM

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.

cwizardone

12-18-2018 11:20 AM

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.

birdboy

12-18-2018 11:36 AM

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

birdboy

12-18-2018 11:54 AM

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).

birdboy

12-18-2018 12:09 PM

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.

birdboy

12-18-2018 12:17 PM

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

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

Gordie

12-18-2018 05:30 PM

I have tried and tried to make Firefox work for my old eyes to no avail. Chromium is actually worse. Chrome works best for me but, but, I just used the SlackBuild for Palemoon from source. I like it so far and am gonna give it an honest try for more than a couple of hours

JWJones

12-18-2018 08:13 PM

I don't currently have it installed, but I recall qutebrowser being fairly lean on RAM.

montagdude

12-18-2018 08:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gordie (Post 5938780)

Just an idea - Vivaldi lets you scale the entire user interface as well as the page content. Might be helpful if things are too small by default.

phalange

12-18-2018 09:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gordie (Post 5938780)

[ctl]+ and [ctl]- zoom the whole page in Firefox. You can increase the font size in on the menu and url bar using either a file called userChrome.css (no relation to Chrome browser) or GTK font size gtk settings. The css has the advantage of only changing Firefox. Firefox has font settings in its preferences to change font rendering size, but these don't change the UI items.

Gordie

12-18-2018 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phalange (Post 5938839)

Kijiji - Follow a link and then go back and you are at the top of the page instead of where the link is. What is with that? Google-Chrome, Chromium and Vivaldi all return to the previous position on the last page.

Try and use the scroll bar and you shoot to the top (or bottom of the page). There exists no arrow at the top or bottom of the scroll bar. What is up with that? PaleMoon has no arrow but at least you can control the scroll bar.

Firefox cannot re-open a closed window and cannot re-open closed tabs after a reboot. Neither can PaleMoon. Google-Chrome and Chromium can. Vivaldi cannot re-open a closed window but it has a feature to re-open many closed tabs which is pretty nice.

Firefox, Google-Chrome, Chromium and PaleMoon all can save page specific zoom settings. Vivaldi cannot and it is real irritating.

http://www.chroniclejournal.com/
Firefox chops the end off the date choice on the obituaries.
Past Week appears as Past Weel. A small thing but after fighting so hard with Firefox to get it to do my bidding it just bugs me to see this underline an unresolved issue.

https://www.distrowatch.com/
Try and vote for a Review of any distro. Google-Chrome usually will not even allow you to because the expected button does not exist. If it does your vote is not recorded anyway so same effect. Same for Chromium while Vivaldi poses no problem. Not tried with PaleMoon yet.

https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware.../ChangeLog.txt
The fonts are pale and washed out. Hard for my old eyes to read in any light.
ctrl and wheel just make the fonts large, pale and washed out. No joy here.

https://www.realtor.ca/map.aspx#Zoom...24768230000001
Firefox chops the numbers for the prices off at the bottom. Not so with Google-Chrome, Chromium or Vivaldi.

I force myself to use it for more than a few hours and my eyes feel like they have sand in them.
The fonts are painful and the rendering of web pages sure is a mess. The fonts on some webpages are squinty while on others they are pale and washed out. You wouldn't believe the changes and additions I have made to my system to try and solve this issue only to have it crop up over and over again. One should not be required to do so much to achieve so little and you should not have to mess with the operating system over this matter.

Chromium is impossible to get a setting that works for all websites. I ran it for years and tried everything I can think of. Messing with fonts, font size and zoom just makes you go around in circles forever.

Google-Chrome just WORKS. PaleMoon is close so far.

ttk	12-18-2018 10:24 PM

Memory use isn't what's draining the battery; CPU load is.

Turn off javascript and your browser should use very, very little CPU except when it is actually rendering a page. You can turn javascript back on when a page actually needs it.

Right now this laptop is running Pale Moon with 271 tabs open in six windows, and with javascript turned off it consumes about 7% CPU. When I turn javascript back on, that zips up to between 60% and 75%.

That's not Pale Moon specific, though, it should work with Firefox or Seamonkey too. I've never used Chrome, but it should work there as well.

Lysander666

12-19-2018 03:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ttk (Post 5938852)

Yep, I was wondering about all these posts regarding memory when it's CPU. My netbook has a CPU monitor which I need to look at to make sure that nothing's draining the battery since I get about 4-5 hours out of a full charge. I use Qupzilla and I'm not sure if there's a way to turn off Javascript. I don't think it's possible to install extensions from the Chrome store either.

birdboy

12-20-2018 06:15 AM

Sorry for the misleading posts regarding memory usage, I was just curious how they stack up in that department and it was easy to measure.

CPU usage and (disk) I/O are more involved, maybe atop over a period of use:

https://haydenjames.io/use-atop-linu...ance-analysis/

andrew.46

12-25-2018 05:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankbell (Post 5938411)

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

It is also a great test of the soundness of the structure of any web site, these days most web sites fail :(.

FTIO	12-26-2018 11:00 AM

For me, I still like Seamonkeyas it just does a few things I like better than any other browser.

In terms of memory used, here's what I got from opening each browser to the same site (here) and to this thread in a new tab (so it would be two tabs on the browser).

In no particular order:

Seamonkey - 215MB

Konqueror (also one I like, but when closed remains as a ghost app running and has to be manually disabled in ksysguard, which is what I used to see what was using what) - 153MB

Firefox (NOT the Slackware one) - 180MB

Opera Dev (latest) - More than 305MB (I didn't want to keep counting all the little 'opera' ID's down the list!)

Icecat - 304MB

Tor broswer (not Slackware one) - 367MB

Chromium (probably a pretty old version at 60.0.3112.78, I also do not like Chromium not just because of their intrusive crap, but it's just a crappy browser, IMHO) - 247MB

I don't have Vivaldi installed, and gave up long ago on Pale Moon, and just don't have the smarts to figure out how to use the browsers like Lynx and other like it. As it stands, I will keep using Seamonkey as my 'Go To', and Firefox and Opera and Tor browser every once in a while for sites where things don't work right with Seamonkey.

Oh, and this is all while using my 14.2 64bit system, not the 32bit.

This is the edit:

After 3 or 4 hours of building the latest qt5 to be able to build the falkon browser, and having built that, here is it's report:

falkon browser - 266MB

A disappointment after having done that long qt build, but oh well, no hair off my teeth, heh.

Ramurd

12-28-2018 08:09 AM

Don't underestimate the amount of battery that is drained by the screen;
Turn it less bright and see how that affects batttery drain.

Lots of white => lots of battery (as all colors have to shine bright; bit depending on the screen technology in use (LED, amoled, tft, ...)

So a darker color scheme can save much battery w/o changing applications.

Lysander666

12-28-2018 08:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ramurd (Post 5942075)

Just to elaborate on this point, I recall a study which found that the biggest battery drain is between 50%-100% brightness. Under 50%, reducing brightness has negligible effects on battery life.

elcore

12-28-2018 08:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FTIO (Post 5941437)

Konqueror (also one I like, but when closed remains as a ghost app running and has to be manually disabled in ksysguard, which is what I used to see what was using what)

I think that's a feature, not a bug. There's a checkbox or something, that keeps it running by default.

FlinchX

01-01-2019 08:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tonus (Post 5938182)

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

are you familiar with this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ma...s_or_Minus_Two

I only exceed those limits whenever I browse a web page and I keep opening interesting links in new tabs while I stay on the page I'm looking at, but knowing I'm going to see those new tabs immediately, then close them.

Generally, I try to push this towards minimization with anything, not just browsing. For example max 3 windows for 3-way merge in a text editor.

Drakeo

01-01-2019 08:16 AM

use Opera with data saving. The real power killer is the net device.
showing used resources have nothing to do with power usage.
The display device will use more power. Turn off desktop effects.

think device not browser.
once the browser is loaded in to memory and the display has rendered it.
Then it is net device. turn off scripts.
all those options have been around a long time.
Opera has a built in adblock so you will use less net.

here is my repack read the readme

https://github.com/Drakeo/opera-slackware-repack

rkfb	01-01-2019 03:29 PM

I use conkeror a lot which is very light on resources:

http://conkeror.org/

If you're an Emacs user then you'll find it really easy to use but it's not too hard to pick up anyway.

Just install palemoon-bin (I got mine from sbopkg, I think it's one from ponce) and xulrunner-1.9.2 from alienbob's 13.37 slackbuild (I have it running in 14.2) and you're good to go.

Start it with:

palemoon-bin --app ~/conkeror/application.ini "$@"

(adjust the path to your conkeror folder accordingly).

jamison20000e

01-01-2019 05:29 PM

There's a function key to turn internet on\off &c...

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