Chrome and Firefox getting slower for old computers!!

[bester69]

Its sad to say but i cant use propertly firefox(iceweasel) and chrome or chromium anymore because thery are getting heavier and heavier as they keep going on, so ihad to stopped it in verision chromium 35, because from that version on its a pain the rendering web. Iceweasel is beggining to happend the same,

My system is:
Jessie 8.2 Kernel 4.1
2G RAM
1G CPU 2Ghz
-----------------

Thanks to god, ive find out a wonderfull browser incredible fast and decent to work, its called Qupzilla, it renders faster than my chromium 35 and it seems to work propertly and smooth, i also tried Midori but its kind of crappy and renders badly. cheers

[kedaha]

Thumbs-up for mentioning Qupzilla; I tried it out once and had forgotten about it. I've just been trying the version of qupzilla from the jessie repo and it's certainly snappier than iceweasel on my old desktop.

[pylkko]

Epiphany is clearly faster than iceweasel but, of course, lacks a lot of the more advanced features.

[Wheelerof4te]

I hear you, my system is even slower than yours and it's getting frustrating.

Even with 2GB of RAM (I have 512MB ), running Iceweasel is a pain on those heavier desktops (such is KDE). Note that 2GB is considered very low on a desktop PC. Try installing noscript and flashblock add-ons, it should help you immensely. Java and Flash are two the most demanding requirements of normal web-browsing.

Also, disable those quirky extensions and effects on KDE, you will notice insane boost in performance. Really, your specs are enough to enjoy just about any GNU/Linux distro.

I have a suggestion. I've seen many of your posts where you were searching for absolute best desktop look, and all of them were inspired by Windows. Why don't you just install Windows 10 and be done with searching for 5-7 years? The OS looks great, you will feel at home. I heard that it's less demanding on specs than Windows 8, more like older Windows 7. I've seen it run well on laptops weaker than yours.

[dust hill resident]

Yeah, it's really sad how bloated and slow the most popular browsers are today. Firefox uses more than 50MB of RAM just sitting with an about:blank page.

Qupzilla sounds good, I'll give it a try.

[arabianights]

I use palemoon on win7/debian7/8 which is a firefox clone minus some useless bloat.

tried Qupzilla before but it constantly crashs on my machine (win7/w2k).

[thanatos_incarnate]

Netsurf is great, just has poor rendering of html5 and js pages.
They want to improve that for their 3.4 release.
Jessie has 3.2

[bester69]

I hear you, my system is even slower than yours and it's getting frustrating.

Even with 2GB of RAM (I have 512MB ), running Iceweasel is a pain on those heavier desktops (such is KDE). Note that 2GB is considered very low on a desktop PC. Try installing noscript and flashblock add-ons, it should help you immensely. Java and Flash are two the most demanding requirements of normal web-browsing.

Also, disable those quirky extensions and effects on KDE, you will notice insane boost in performance. Really, your specs are enough to enjoy just about any GNU/Linux distro.

I have a suggestion. I've seen many of your posts where you were searching for absolute best desktop look, and all of them were inspired by Windows. Why don't you just install Windows 10 and be done with searching for 5-7 years? The OS looks great, you will feel at home. I heard that it's less demanding on specs than Windows 8, more like older Windows 7. I've seen it run well on laptops weaker than yours.

hi,

My Kde runs great and smooth with 2G RAM and with basic several effects actived in kwin such as windows effects, so Kde is not the problem, i think the browser problem is not a problem of memory but cpu . By the way ive Windows 10 in other boot partition and runs very slow in comparison with debian or XP for my specs system, i think again im lacking some more cpu speed..

[bester69]

Netsurf is great, just has poor rendering of html5 and js pages.
They want to improve that for their 3.4 release.
Jessie has 3.2

ive just tried it, and as you said it has poor rendering but its pretty fast, id recomend you Qupzilla, its almost same fast but lack some stability.

[dasein]

There's just no pleasing some people. They'll start one thread whining about lack of new features. Then they'll start another whining about how all the new features of something-or-another makes it consume more resources (RAM, CPU, etc).

Some peoples' kids.

[NFT5]

My Kde runs great and smooth with 2G RAM and with basic several effects actived in kwin such as windows effects, so Kde is not the problem

I'd suggest that it is. DE's, especially those like KDE and Gnome have been known to consume close to your system's RAM capacity with their overhead. This leaves little to actually run your apps.

On a system like yours I think that you'd find much better performance from Firefox if you were to run a lighter DE. Even on a system like the one I'm on now (quad core 3.6GHz CPU with 8GB RAM, SSD etc.) there is a significant difference. My DE consumes less than 5% of my RAM whereas yours is likely sitting at somewhere around 30-50%, maybe more. Look too, at your internet connection speed. I have 60Mb/s at home but only 8Mb/s at work and the difference is quite noticeable, but not a function of the browser.

For me, the OS and DE are only the basic environment and tools to allow me to run those apps that allow me to do what I want to do, quickly and efficiently. I'm a graphical, mouse wielding kind of bloke, so I'm not talking about CLI here, yet I'm much happier with the performance I get using MATE than I have been with KDE or Gnome. IMHO it's far better to concentrate on giving your apps the best possible environment in which to perform, than it is to concentrate on that environment allowing it to become a millstone around the neck of your application.

[steve_v]

There's just no pleasing some people. They'll start one thread whining about lack of new features. Then they'll start another whining about how all the new features of something-or-another makes it consume more resources (RAM, CPU, etc).

Some peoples' kids.

What, you mean more features require more resources?
Who would have thought...

[No_windows]

My old desktop has gotten quite slow. Ram usage was always just under 2gb, and using swap space, so I have assumed the ram was what was limiting the machine. I'm one to keep lots of browser tabs open, and I was having to limit the number open more and more to keep the computer usable. I don't have as much problems with my new/used computer..... it's got 16gigs of ram, and rarely touches swap. Still it seems to have problems from time to time. Sometimes VLC starts hogging a whole core, even while not playing and killing the process put it back to normal. Other times I think it's a web page, or it's ads.

Qupzilla runs well. I didn't like Netsurf, as it didn't seem to render pages very well.

[thanatos_incarnate]

Qupzilla is great, yet I worry about the lack of security in webkit browsers.

I also use Zotero a lot, so I need a current Iceweasel. I'm mostly happy
with it on my primary machine, but on my little 5year old netbook,
surfing can be a pain sometimes.

EDIT: Seems like Qupzilla is offering its latest version as a Debian package
that installs without problems on Jessie. Works very snappy for now.
http://www.qupzilla.com/download#debian

EDIT2: Still uses Jessie's webkit, so same thing when it comes to security

[bester69]

My Kde runs great and smooth with 2G RAM and with basic several effects actived in kwin such as windows effects, so Kde is not the problem

I'd suggest that it is. DE's, especially those like KDE and Gnome have been known to consume close to your system's RAM capacity with their overhead. This leaves little to actually run your apps.

On a system like yours I think that you'd find much better performance from Firefox if you were to run a lighter DE. Even on a system like the one I'm on now (quad core 3.6GHz CPU with 8GB RAM, SSD etc.) there is a significant difference. My DE consumes less than 5% of my RAM whereas yours is likely sitting at somewhere around 30-50%, maybe more. Look too, at your internet connection speed. I have 60Mb/s at home but only 8Mb/s at work and the difference is quite noticeable, but not a function of the browser.

For me, the OS and DE are only the basic environment and tools to allow me to run those apps that allow me to do what I want to do, quickly and efficiently. I'm a graphical, mouse wielding kind of bloke, so I'm not talking about CLI here, yet I'm much happier with the performance I get using MATE than I have been with KDE or Gnome. IMHO it's far better to concentrate on giving your apps the best possible environment in which to perform, than it is to concentrate on that environment allowing it to become a millstone around the neck of your application.

Ive got installed both MATE and KDE, ive compared both in jessie, and the two of them runs same smooth and same responsive, its just that kde 4 consume some more RAM mainly because of akonady process, if you'd stop akonady process it'd consume almost the same RAM as MATE. So as i told you my problem is not the RAM neither the tabs opened, its something about the CPU, my system is 1G 32bits CPU and seems that new browsers are getting heavier for those spec.

By the way from 2G RAM on you can run KDE propertly, with just 1G RAM you cant run it propertly, i left MATE because i didnt see any reason for use it having available dolphin and akonady in kde, but mate is very good also.

regards.

[Nili]

Debian : 8.2
Kernel : 3.16.7-ckt20-1+deb8u1 (2015-12-14)
Iceweasel : 43.0 (jessie-backports)

Sata 150GB
Old Computer : Dell 2GB RAM

Iceweasel 140MB (idle/ram usage) 0%CPU
It has always been so, at least since version 24.0 when i first used to Debian, I only use Iceweasel by Debian. Perhaps, you may need to think again about Iceweasel and leave Firefox.

The slowness you notice may be the cause of the Bigger DE? ie KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon etc... I always use WM (Highly recommended for older computers).

My Iceweasel running with 20tabs open, rarely exceeds 250MB RAM. I think it is very important how we're controlling and managing the Debian system by installing only necessary packages without excessive dependencies. Older computers must tweaked and optimized at the best chance possible to have an excellent resistance.

I'm happy with Iceweasel fast performance on a older 2007 desktop.

Perhaps i am just repeating myself, sorry
Nili

[spacex]

You won't hear me complaint, because I need lots of the new features. Can't get it both ways. Yes, Chrome is heavy, but extremely fast if you have the resources for it. On my hardware it's actually the fastest browser available. Way faster than many of the "lighter" browsers. Iceweasel or Firefox is slow no matter what hardware I'm on, so that's probably just built badly...

[thanatos_incarnate]

Chrome is heavy, but extremely fast if you have the resources for it. On my hardware it's actually the fastest browser available.

That's also my experience. I guess it has to do with Chrome's better handling of multicore processors and (possibly) 3D graphics cards.
But I just find Google to be a bit too scary. Hoping Mozilla will get to the multithreading code soon. It's been in the dev channels for a while, but too unstable AFAIK.

[oswaldkelso]

I have noticed a slowdown in later versions of icecat and tor-browser compared to the latest version of seamonkey my usual browser.
With Netsurf and dillo I expect some things to not work. You just need to learn to work with them and their foibles

I have good success with dwb and fifth but not that much lighter than seamonkey with the same of tabs open.

I like the same experience on all my computers so chrome never gets near them. Someone was using it on the office machine and it was a huge memory hog

[Head_on_a_Stick]

chrome [...] huge memory hog

True but only because it sandboxes the tabs.

If you have the memory it's a useful feature and one notably lacking in most other browsers.