[dredmorbius]

As of a couple of years ago, I was using a mid-naughts iMac with Linux installed for a number of projects. It was fine for basic scripting, data analysis, and shell-based Web access.

A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.

(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)

That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.

Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.

And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.

[mymac]

Interesting. I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 10+ year old thinkbook with 16G in it (they were only sold with 8 at the time but replacing the two 4G modules with 8G modules worked, 16G does not seem to work).

Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.

[lost_tourist]

modern browsers don't really keep hundreds of tabs open, they just keep a place holder and then return the memory back to the system as resources get low. I'm not sure why people think a browser can keep 100s of webpages open when modern webpages (tabs) often use 100MB->1GB of memory.

[dredmorbius]

Browser memory management has been improving, but when that system was last running, let's just say that things were bad.

[dredmorbius]

SSD or HDD?

16 GB would be about 8-16x what the system I'm describing had.

How are you blacklisting sites? Pihole/DNS, or something within Firefox itself?

[amenhotep]

1 or 2 GB of RAM? Yeah, that would've been the problem. Old CPUs can handle more than people think but there's absolutely no getting away from modern memory demands.

[justinclift]

Yeah. 8GB of ram is pretty much the minimum usable amount these days. If you can get 8GB into an older machine (with an SSD), then it should work fine.

But 4GB? Pass.

[niutech]

I have a Lenovo Chromebook with 4GB and GalliumOS and it is still very capable with the latest Firefox.

[jules22]

With the right distro, 4GB with just a HDD is quite fine for Chromebook style usage.

[niutech]

This is why AMP HTML was forced by Google - to make websites faster and more lightweight.

One solution is to use uBlock Origin, disable JS on most websites and whitelist it only for those which really need it.

Another is to use a textual web browser in the cloud, such as Carbonyl Terminal: https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal

[lost_tourist]

Yeah something that old is gonna be heavily memory restricted, javascript chews through memory like nobody's business, then you start swapping and it's game over.