Apropos Tech Solutions Corp. Blog

Tag: browsers

  • Web, Linux: lightweight browsers, part0

    Especially with Linux on an old computer, one might seek a lightweight browser.

    The following is by my understanding.

    I loaded Lubuntu onto a Vista-era computer two days back; perhaps I will mention more about that in another post. However, for earlier mention of Lubuntu, there is my post from June 19, 2026.

    Lubuntu comes with Firefox. On this Vista-era computer, which runs Lubuntu fine, Firefox takes a few seconds, after clicking, to load, but it does. However, a given web page might take a good deal longer to load – perhaps ten seconds or much more.

    I looked into lightweight browsers and loaded Falkon. While I was impressed with its minimal design, the web pages didn’t seem to load faster on it. Falkon seemed to work about as well as Firefox.

    It seems to me that a lightweight browser won’t solve the problem of navigating the web on a slow computer, because the web pages typically use a lot more resources than the browser itself does. High-resolution images and JavaScript, both on the page itself and in subframes, can easily bog down an old computer.

    -js

  • Web: browsers: how to find memory usage by tab in Firefox

    Especially on a light-resource system, one might want to discover which tab(s) are using a lot of juice.

    The following is how I see it.

    Right now I’m using what I’d call a Linux crunch box. It’s a computer from around 2017 that can’t run Windows 10 or 11 but can run Linux – specifically, Lubuntu.

    With my Windows PC, I commonly have 50 tabs open, sometimes on three different browsers(!), so 150 tabs total. [I am trying to cut down, though.] However, this low-resource crunchbox, whose distro included Firefox (as Linux commonly does, it seems), can’t run more than ten tabs without getting boggy. It depends on the tabs (the sites on the tabs), of course, but when I get to around ten tabs, I follow the “open one then close one” rule.

    That said, there are some sites that simply use a lot of computing power, likely because of ads. If I go to one of those sites, this PC’s fan ramps up. I either have to wait until I’m on the Windows PC to visit them, or else close more tabs in Firefox – maybe down to three or four – before visiting one of those high-resource sites.

    Some browsers, when you mouse over a tab, it shows that tab’s memory usage. What about Firefox?

    To find per-tab memory usage on Firebox, one goes into the application menu (top right, the three horizontal lines), then into More Tools, then Task Manager. You’ll see:)

    Source:

    support.mozilla.org

    -JS