Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
I run a 2012-ish Macbook Pro which has 8gb of ram. I noticed today that Chrome takes up at least a couple of those gigs throughout the day. I'm looking for suggestions for alternatives, preferably extremely lightweight (memory efficient) and open-source. Would love to hear what the community is using.
Memory use isn't real though, especially with OSX and Chrome. It is just eating up what's available as an optimisation, not taking only what it needs.
Also, get Firefox.
I use Firefox but it's a memory hog too. To be fair, websites are the memory hogs imo.
Sadly I don't think you can have the full web experience without sacrificing a couple gigs of ram if you have several tabs open at once.
I know it's not open source but on a Macbook I would expect Safari to be the lightest browser.
If you really want open and still like Chrome, you could try ungoogled chromium here : https://chromium.woolyss.com/
Why wouldn't you use Safari on it? When it comes to being optimised for the Mac, that's where it's at.
You're on a closed sourced OS, webkit is open.
I tried a few lightweight Linux browsers on a 2GB low-clocked Celeron machine a while back ("hacked", older-model Asus Chromebox). Chief candidates were Surf, Qutebrowser, and Midori.
The best on the performance/ui-jank scale was Surf, by a long shot. In fact it was best on both counts. I can't remember which was which but one of the three was noticeably much heavier than the other two, taking a long time to load and sometimes having slow paints, and the other had a lot of weird UI issues that might have been ironed out by running under an all-the-bells-and-whistles DE (KDE or Gnome) which tend to helpfully fix all the UI problems they introduce, but if you're really resource-constrained there's no way you can afford to run either of those (especially Gnome).
Surf's very shortcut-focused in its UI so there's a bit of memorization needed, and you may want to compile it with a few patches for convenience, but its performance and rendering were, in the field of low-resource browsers, outstanding.
[reads post more carefully] Oh you're on Mac and have 8GB of memory? Just use Safari, it makes way, way better use of resources than Chrome or Firefox. Seriously, it's way better, at the cost of having worse extensions, but you're gonna give those up on any other low-resource option anyway. Also stop using the webapp versions of crapware like Gmail if you're going to leave it open all the time—use native mail clients or the "basic HTML" version. Keep your "webapps" in their own windows and close them when not in use, they all eat shitloads of memory for no good reason, no matter the browser.
after a few minutes inactive tabs gets killed - works for me very well - you can also exclude sites.
My dream is that someone will spec out a nice simple subset of modern HTML/CSS, and folks will start making compatible static sites. A few years of that and we could have some nice truly lightweight browsers again. Imagine how fast sites like Wikipedia or YouTube could be if JS wasn't even an option.
Firefox? You can also go to "about:memory" and press "Minimize memory usage" to free up memory if you're having issues.
Not sure if you're running OS X or Linux or something else, but on my 2GB netbook I've had good results using Falkon and Links. The former plays YouTube videos just fine, and the latter is more like using a mainstream browser in reading mode.
https://www.falkon.org/
http://links.twibright.com/
Brave and Vivaldi are both Chromium based, but perhaps worth a shot.
There's only two other engines left: firefox and webkit. You may want to look into a webkit based browser?
Safari is the most efficient in terms of memory and battery for macOS. The core of safari - WebKit - is open source. The browser itself is not. Firefox is what I use but it’s only marginally better than chrome.
I can suggest qutebrowser.
MSFT's edge chromium is not truly open source, but it is the easiest browser to migrate to from Chrome, and it is far less resource intensive.
It also brings some really neat new features, and I find it mind boggling that Google never brought them to chrome.
I have been using it as my primary for a few months now, and I miss nothing.
disclaimer: I am affiliated with MSFT, but don't know anyone in the browser team and readily shit on other MSFT efforts that don't quite work.
It's no open source, but it is lightweight and good on battery. I use Safari on MacOS. The shortcomings keep me from expecting too much from my applications.
Unfortunately most of the options that come to mind are not available for MacOS.
I know this isn't what you asked, but if I wanted to reinvigorate a 2012 Macbook Pro I would look install something like Lubuntu on it, which focuses on being lightweight, and would run Falkon or Midori.
As you are on Mac, Safari is your best choice. It is already optimized for it. I recently switched to it as my main browser, and I doubt I will look back.
Sure it is closed-source (although WebKit is open), but you already use Apple's OS.
Dillo and Netsurf are much smaller than mainstream browsers. But it takes some dedication to use these as ypu have to forgo many web services that aren't compatible.
Another option is to use a remote server to run the browser.
You should just use Safari. There is nothing more efficient on the Mac, and it’s been kept up to date as far back as High Sierra (just got an update a couple of weeks ago on my oldest mini).
I use safari on a similar Mac with no problems.
Also this probably isn’t what you want to hear but I also got a headless desktop recently for all my dev related work... that made my Mac a lot faster!!
Auto Tab Discard for ff+chrome kills off old tabs without closing them. This frees up the resources allocated for that tab, and the page will reload when you focus on it again.
If you want lightweight browsing, use Firefox with NoScript.
If you are ok with using older versions of Firefox(2014), they are pretty lightweight and much faster than Chrome or current Firefox.
Dillo if you don't need javascript... hehe
Also, if you run with tons of tabs open, try "The Great Suspender" chrome extension.
Are we really complaining about browsers on a computer with 8gb of RAM?
I use Lynx and surf. surf also has no tabs, so that helps too.
I suggest Nyxt browser, very lightweight and extensible
Give Brave a try, it is open source and should perform better than chrome on your hardware.
Plus it has great inbuilt ad filtering and privacy features.
Firefox. Block ads. It’ll do fine.
MacOS? what about Safari?
I suggest Nyxt, very lightweight
just install another 8GB of RAM, 2012 mbp allows you to do that, more recent mbp all took that luxury away from users.
You can very easily and inexpensively upgrade this laptop to 16GB of RAM. I highly recommend you do this, it makes a world of difference.
If you don't already have an SSD in this device I recommend you swap that out also.
I would like to echo the recommendation for Firefox + uBlock Origin - you will see big improvements in perceived performance.
(typing this on my 2011 MacBook Pro in FF)