| I used to help port Linux to various devices like the HP Jornada [0] or the Ben Nanonote [1], both of which have (up to) 32MB of RAM available. Finding a suitable web browser with reasonable support for "modern" web standards (basically CSS2) and a lightweight footprint was terribly hard... the better ones, as I remember them, were: 1) Dillo[2], which was one of the most lightweight graphical browsers under active development, albeit a bit light on features as well... FLTK is a great toolkit, and runs well on resource-starved devices like the ones mentioned above. 2) Netsurf[3], a relative newcomer, had one of the best rendering engines out there considering its lightweight footprint. It too is under active development, and is moving towards HTML5 and CSS3 compatibility. Has GTK2 and framebuffer backends, the last of which is better in terms of memory footprint. 3) Konqueror-Embedded[4], which hasn't seen development since the mid-2000s, was actually the only browser with reasonable support for web standards and support for Javascript. Built against QT2 (which is a massive chore in itself), it runs fast and has a low memory footprint. 4) Links-hacked[5], which again hasn't seen any development in more than 10 years, worked pretty well in graphical mode. It's a mix between elinks code (before Javascript support was gutted out) and links2 code (for the graphical parts). Some failed experiments were: Firefox version 1.0.8, last release with GTK 1.2 support, was, unfortunately, too slow to run in any reasonable way. Startup time was around 1:30 minutes on the HP Jornada, and navigating to any web-page took more than 3 minutes. Hv3[6], a browser and engine built in TCL/TK, looked promising but was a nightmare to compile and never worked correctly. Finding modern software that can run well in such memory-constrained enviroment was hard enough, let alone something as complex as a web rendering engine. [0]: https://deuill.org/page/1/jlime-vargtass
[1]: https://deuill.org/page/3/jlime-muffinman
[2]: http://www.dillo.org/
[3]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
[4]: https://konqueror.org/embedded/
[5]: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/~karpov/links-hacked/
[6]: http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html |