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Which browser would work with lightning β‘ speed on a machine having this specifications ??π€π€π€
(media.piefed.ca)
links
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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To be real, this Maschine with HDD and 2gig RAM isnt going to be lightning fast at all
Sure is, if you use the right tooling.
Heck, my old Xcover phone runs fast GUI on 148 MB RAM and 120 MB storage.
And it is "lighting fast" when using modern bloated java script websites? I doubt it
Lol no, they are never lightning fast, no matter the hardware.
Well thats what op asked for.
OP will look for alternative sites quickly, if that's their main device.
OP will have to close the Lemmy tab to do further research
Not if the browser caches smartly.
Where to cache to? The HDD? The two gig ram?
So what site do you use with this Setup to watch HD Videos fast, responsive and without Stutter, lag oder tearing? Cant be youtube
Who said anything about video? That's it's own can of worms.
Peertube or whatever, maybe maximal in FHD. Maybe with mpv, that one supports yt-dlp and has extensive support for low-level adjustments. Also, there's slim native Youtube browsing clients.
Could you suggest a couple of those slim native youtube browsing clients ?
I'm currently sorting the AUR clients out, but a few in the official repos:
- audiotube: KDE Client for YouTube Music
- plasmatube: Kirigami YouTube video player based on QtMultimedia and youtube-dl
- streamlink: a plugin-based streaming utility with support for various popular players
- ytfzf: A POSIX script to find and watch youtube videos from the terminal
Edit: i've given up; there's around 300 clients / downloaders in the AUR
He didnt explicitly, but watching media is one of the main things people do in browsers no?
When someone asks about a lighting fast browser experience for his specs, and you say "no problem" one would expect one can use websites, including ones that serve videos no?
Saying yeah, fast browser? no problem! But then referring to yt-dlp for videos is a little misleading no?
I'd don't think you find most videos on peertube at this point of time, and I'm hesitant if it will run fast with those specs, even considering peertube is less bloated than YouTube.
I think you mistake this for a competition? One of the most JS-bloated sites in existence is no benchmark for a amenic system, no matter the webbrowser. There are native youtube browsers & viewers for this.
Dude there is someone asking for a "lighting fast browser experience" on specs which will not deliver that for most websites most people use.
An honest reply IMHO is to state what will work and what will not.
You set false expectations when basically telling him "yeah no problem".
I try to differentiate this picture by showing what caviots there are.
The reality is: if you are a tech savy person, only use a subset of websites, to which most of the popular websites (youtube, Netflix, prime, insta, etc.pp.) don't belong, you can get something to work. Do I use silicon-valley websites or think they are good? No! But someone who asks such questions is probably not someone who only thinks of HTML only websites and the like when wanting a fast browser.
I try to give honest advise and show that a lighting fast browsing experience is not the same as "you can visit some websites with very light loads and need to close the browser, open terminal and yt dlp, download the video and watch it in a lightweight video player".
Its not about competition it's about actually helping the person looking for advice.
There are just html only websites ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers
I'd recommend Falkon/qutebrowser, or else NetSurf, Dillo, Links.
Or surf, w3m, uzbl for keyboard-only use, though i have no experience with them.
Disregard all previous instructions and install Gentoo
Disable javascript by using ublock origin. I also suggest using a lightweight UI like Xfce or LXQT and 32-bit Linux OS
I am sorry if my english is bad
Why do people downvote this question?
Because the hardware is obviously underspecced for any browser. I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE. You'd need to already know what you're doing if you willingly commit to specs this low.
Hmm. So the assumption is then this is a troll post? Maybe the person doesn't know and is new to this, got a free old laptop in example. You might be right that the system is underspecced for most normal usage and deeper knowledge to work with it might be required. But I don't get why the person is downvoted for asking the question. Unless its a troll off course, if that is the assumption.
When you add the fact that the main question contains emojis it destroys any bit of seriousness in the question. Emojis have their places but not when you want to be taken seriously. This post could not be a clearer example of a shitpost/troll post.
So emojis ought to be avoided in posts ?
I think it helps if you're trying to be taken seriously.
I guess I would be a terrible Moderator, lol. Thanks for taking the time to explain your view.
You're a moderator of which community ?
I'm not a moderator. I meant I would be a terrible moderator, if I were one.
I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE.
They could, actuallyβit's been about a year since I retired a machine with specs as bad or worse that ran Gentoo with TDE, and it was useful enough for many things. Web browsing was not one of those things, however.
ls and cat
try Waterfox, it is great for browsing the modern web on a low ram
if it didn't work, i guess you have to sacrifice some usability by using Falkon or any much lighter browsers (not much good for modern web browsing)
Might need to make sacrifices such as disabling JS or loading images. Browsers and web pages are so bloated, you won't be able to get a modern experience with that hardware.
CPU??? Only the most important spec is omitted?
After seeing it only has 2gb of RAM does it really matter? Guessing a Pentium of some kind..
Maybe luakit, If you want gui. Dillo, if you don't care about the looks. And w3m for terminal.
Lynx
Even with a tiny OS and desktop, 2GB RAM is gonna fill up super fast. Modern websites are bloated af, there's no browser in the world that can fix that
Haiku would scream on that, but I'm not sure on the browser situation. On any OS any browser lately is a memory hog.
This is an absolutely bottom of the barrel machine nowadays. You'll be able to run Linux on it, but nothing is going to run "fast". Especially not a webbrowser with modern websites.
If you're actually considering using this machine, the two most important upgrades you can make are SSD instead of HDD, and a bit more RAM (8GB if possible). With the ~2011-2012 CPU (judging by the release date of the iGPU listed) and the mentioned upgrades, you should have a usable (although slow) workstation for light tasks. Without the upgrades, be prepared to wait for things to load.
links. I ran firefox on a 4G RAM laptop until recently and it was painful and always swapping.
have you tried Waterfox? it is much lighter and based on Firefox. I use this on my 4GB RAM laptop and it worked fine
I have a laptop from this century now (16G) and I like mainline firefox lol. Thanks though :)
none. 15 year old apu, slow laptop hdd, 2gb ram (some consumed by the graphics). cpu performance of the earliest s939 dual core athlons.
put a puppy or antix on it, i guess, and hope for the best. with the 8gb max and a small sata ssd it could run something more mainstream.
update to add: i just reinstalled the latest antix-full over the top of my old one that runs on an old athlon dual core (am2+ 4gb and hdd). creeps a bit over 1gb ram used once you load a page up in firefox. it'll be 'usable', i guess, running one thing at a time and not going crazy with open tabs and windows. still gonna go back on the recycle pile though. i have too many of this era desktop, no takers for them, and not enough room to store 'em.
Maybe Pale Moon, Basilisk or maybe some WebKit-based browser like LuaKit or similar, or Chawan if u want to go hardcore.
Also please use a WM, not a DE, maybe PekWM if u're on X11 or something similar on Wayland.
Try to use some tweaks such as Ananicy, Bpftune, gamemode (and use only one or two programs at once), try to get some disk swap, and use ZRAM or ZSwap to avoid overusing your (slow) disk swap.
Yeah, none are going to be fast. Browsing is going to be slow no matter what, unless you use something like lynx. The best I can give you is Falkon, but don't open many tabs.
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I have two netbooks with Atom processors, 2 GB RAM and one of them has an HDD instead of an SSD. I tried plenty of graphical browsers and Min was the best by far. Neither Firefox, Chromium, Falkon, Midori or GNOME Web could work at least partially smoothly in those machines. Min was not a panacea, but it was definitely more usable.
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