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.
For Firefox I am using an extension called auto tab discard (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...). It will suspend tabs from memory that have not been opened for a given time but you can easily open them again by pressing the tab. You can also whitelist some domains to prevent them from being suspended.
Give it a try. There is also the great suspender for Chrome.
Contrary to OP, my problem with a browser (or Electron app) consuming a lot of RAM is philosophical not material : I have 16G at home and 32G at work so it's more than enough to accommodate any gluttonous browser.
Some are, yes, and when your browser is eating a lot of memory, it's usually the website's fault.
But there are many sites out there that are quite lightweight (including this one). On the laptop I'm writing this on, I currently have 31 tabs open in Firefox on Linux (not counting tabs that are just viewing PDF files, only tabs that are on actual websites) and the browser's memory resident set size is less than 700 MB.
I’m also using Firefox, but instead of ublock origin I’m using an extension called “Disable JavaScript” combined with the out of the box tracking protection (in strict mode). On my laptop with 4G of RAM, this works fairly well.
For the vast majority of news websites, running without js is a huge improvement to both performance and user experience. It even gets around a lot of paywalls.
I don’t think the sites that run slowly would be helped by a “lightweight” browser, since it’s not the browser itself that’s slowing things down, but the website. The only way to fix this is to remove those features from the website, whether that’s by disabling them, or using a browser that doesn’t support those features (eg a text-only browser).
I discovered this only months ago, but you can configure uBlock Origin to disable javascript, block remote fonts, and/or large media files (check "I am an advanced user" in the settings).
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.
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.
Is the first step really needed? Nothing technical is stopping folks from making such websites. If browsers use a lot more RAM than needed when viewing such simple websites (I'm not even sure that is the case!), there should be low hanging fruit improvements to decrease RAM usage in this scenario.
The most frustrating thing about web standards is that if we were going to do the whole apps-over-HTTP/HTML thing we could have features and light weight, by building way more functionality directly into HTML. Better form elements with more built-in features, better tables more like what's available in native UI kits, maybe even direct built-in support for major, complex UIs to support ecommerce and banking workflows and such, bring back frames but make them less-shit (seriously, how much of "AJAX" use is, in practice, basically just slightly-less-shit frames?), that kind of thing.
... and then cripple JavaScript so everyone has to use the built-in features and can't get "cute" at the user's expense.
But no, instead we're burning enormous quantities of person-hours doing the same damn thing over and over with bad tools and creatively-broken a11y support and shitty custom animations no-one wants, and wasting huge amounts of energy and users' time.
I saw something like what you wish for mentioned here once or twice but the name escapes me. Documents consisted of just text and styles, but the project made the strange choice not to use HTTP for transport.
The Gemini protocol? It's a cool project but I think for anything to get big it would have to remain compatible with current browsers. The idea is a crowd-sourced embrace-extend-extinguish, except the opposite of extend.
Big tech players have been happy to create 'lite' versions of their apps for the developing world market, so this doesn't seem completely far fetched to me
You don't need to migrate. Keep it compatible with current browsers. Users will reap the benefits of the lightweight sites regardless of what browser they use. It would sort of be like AMP that way. But over time if you get enough major sites with compatible versions it would become useful to have a browser that only speaks the lightweight web, and that's when things could start to snowball. At no point do you need big companies or browser vendors to do anything other than not break current HTML/CSS compatibility.
You may have noticed that this was pretty much exactly what I was talking about ;) Usability issues aside, nobody fixed their stuff until Google threatened their SEO.
If server side rendering and a subset of js were sectioned off, the browser could have an alert icon that says "this website has dreadful performance, click here to quarantine it" that allows people to disable js forever. Websites could comply with the new standard or risk being user quarantined.
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.
ill give Brave a nod as well. Everybody is so offput by its optional ads, they are missing out on the most efficient, fastest, and best "it just works" ad blocker out. It's a pleasure to surf the web again after years of ublock/umatrix and constantly having to tweak the settings for each site I visited.
Edge has become my backup quick test of "is it something in Brave breaking it"
I have Firefox open at all times as well, but find myself using it the least of the three.
No other reason for Brave? Some don’t want to or care for blocking ads and others don’t do it at the browser level. Does Brave have anything at that point?
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.
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).
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.
I think the source of OPs problem is the type of websites he is visiting rather than the default memory usage patterns of a browser, but....
8GB really isn't that much memory at all when it comes to the resource hogging that is occuring at every level of the stack. Win 10 is using like 4GB RAM at idle these days and one Youtube tab takes the other 4 :)
I agree, though OP is a little ambiguous if this is a 2012 Unibody (which has USB3 and one of the best old machines) or a 2012 Retina which he would be out of luck.
I've upgraded multiple 2011/2012 Unibody MBP for friends and family with 16gb ram and a 512gb ssd for about $150 in the past few years, it makes the machine feel completely new and "snappy".
Also, get Firefox.