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Could you suggest me browser with lowest CPU / memory usage?

Requirements:

  • I need to open many tabs (30-40)
  • Close/open tabs over and over again
  • Flash/JavaScript not needed
  • Images not really needed

What I tried:

  • I've tried with Google Chrome It works normally when I start, but after 5 times 30 tabs closed and opened again It became very high memory usage.
  • As I know IE, Opera and Firefox Mozilla not so best choice.

Could you suggest me any other browser with really low memory / CPU usage?

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  • Read this computerworld.com/s/article/9243574/…
    – Cornelius
    Commented Apr 28, 2014 at 11:37
  • 2
    I think chrome is your best bet for a lightweight browser...what you are doing simply requires a lot of memory.
    – James
    Commented Apr 28, 2014 at 14:18
  • What features do you need - I'm see tabs and low memory; what else: ie images (as miroxlav said)? How about JavaScript? How about Flash? CSS? etc.
    – Nick Dickinson-Wilde
    Commented Apr 28, 2014 at 14:40
  • @StanislovasKalašnikovas: Do you need to see/read the content of the pages, or is it only about the GET requests?
    – unor
    Commented Apr 30, 2014 at 1:05
  • 1
    @James, Chrome is one of the most memory intensive browsers ever because each tab is like a "standalone browser". Chrome is known for its speed, and that's because its one of the most heavyweight RAM-gobbling browsers out there.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 15:35

4 Answers 4

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I often browse in the console using w3m. Being a console app I thought that it would be intimidating, but in fact it is very easy to use. Note that w3m supports the two features that you mention: tabs and low memory usage.

For browsing simple websites such as Slashdot I find w3m even easier to use that Firefox, but for web applications (such as Stack Overflow) it is useless.

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  • There is console client for SO.
    – Nakilon
    Commented Mar 30, 2018 at 22:51
7

Why not Firefox?

Go to about:config page and adjust the following settings:

javascript.enabled -> false      # Disable JavaScript
permissions.default.image -> 0   # Disable images by default
plugin.state.flash -> 0          # Never activate Flash

Also you may find useful the option "Don't load tabs until selected" (Options → tab "Tabs") if you don't need to load content from all pages directly at start-up.

Maybe Adblock will help also but it depends on your pages. Don't forget that you may also write your personal rules to block loading of unneeded elements.

If you already using Firefox as a normal browser, you will be interested in creating separate profile with adjusted settings and launching them in parallel.

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4

There is also a text-only browser lynx (it is not tabbed, so you will have new windows instead of tabs) which is very light on resources. There are also browsers that build on it: links and links2 (with image support) and elinks (with Javascript support but without images).

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0

There are two browsers that I know of that will support your requirements. One is Diglo and the other is Blackhawk. They are both based off of Chrome but their memory use is very low. I have ran as many as 300+tabs on Diglo.

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  • I would upvote if I saw with Q/A earlier but today Diglo link seems to be dead. Blackhawk pages don't have any timestamps and the copyright is 2011, so I can't tell it's enough up-to-date to be safe to use in modern web.
    – Nakilon
    Commented Mar 30, 2018 at 22:49

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