5 ms·

Even going as far back as Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad, while running Linux or even mildly debloated Win10, as long as it’s been outfitted with an SSD it’s not immedi

Even going as far back as Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad, while running Linux or even mildly debloated Win10, as long as it’s been outfitted with an SSD it’s not immediately obvious I’m using a 15+ year old machine until I have to open a web browser. These machines are perfectly usable outside of the boundlessly hungry entity that is the web.

nicbou 3y ago
I had a Macbook 12" for a while and it was fantastic. However YouTube brought it to a crawl, as did Google Maps. Everything else rant quite fine.
mymac 3y ago
If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.
- dacryn 3y ago
  Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance. This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        Browser memory management has been improving, but when that system was last running, let's just say that things were bad.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        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.
- beretguy 3y ago
  To aggressively speed up internet just block JavaScript. I use this extension which makes it easy and convenient: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javascript/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas... Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.
didntcheck 3y ago
It's also very noticeable on smartphones. My phone is as snappy with native apps as when I first bought it, but every year the ridiculous amount of CPU time and memory it takes to render a basic news article increases. The last time I did upgrade phones it was specifically to get more RAM, as I was finding that modern web pages were so hungry that switching to tab n was almost always evicting tab n-1, necessitating lots of reloads if I was cross-referencing information. And that was on a Nexus 6, not a budget phone, and only a few years after its release
- jwells89 3y ago
  Have had similar experiences on iPhones. Multiple native apps can stay in memory and play nice with each other for indefinite periods, but then I need to go visit a heavy website for some reason or another and it starts booting apps out of memory. It’s ridiculous.
ksec 3y ago
At home, I am still on my 2015 MacBook Pro. The only thing I wished had done with going with 16GB Memory instead of 8GB. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox does far better with many tabs. While Safari constantly for one reason or another reload every single in-active tabs which causes insane memory paging. Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer. And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.
distract8901 3y ago
I'm still using a 3rd gen i5 machine as my daily driver. It's only just now getting to the point that I'm thinking about upgrading. And even then, it's really only that I need more cores. Quad core just isn't cutting it for my C++ compilation. Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things

nicbou 3y ago

I had a Macbook 12" for a while and it was fantastic. However YouTube brought it to a crawl, as did Google Maps. Everything else rant quite fine.

mymac 3y ago

If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.

dacryn 3y ago
Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance. This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.
dredmorbius 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Browser memory management has been improving, but when that system was last running, let's just say that things were bad.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
beretguy 3y ago
To aggressively speed up internet just block JavaScript. I use this extension which makes it easy and convenient: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javascript/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas... Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.

didntcheck 3y ago

It's also very noticeable on smartphones. My phone is as snappy with native apps as when I first bought it, but every year the ridiculous amount of CPU time and memory it takes to render a basic news article increases. The last time I did upgrade phones it was specifically to get more RAM, as I was finding that modern web pages were so hungry that switching to tab n was almost always evicting tab n-1, necessitating lots of reloads if I was cross-referencing information. And that was on a Nexus 6, not a budget phone, and only a few years after its release

jwells89 3y ago
Have had similar experiences on iPhones. Multiple native apps can stay in memory and play nice with each other for indefinite periods, but then I need to go visit a heavy website for some reason or another and it starts booting apps out of memory. It’s ridiculous.

ksec 3y ago

At home, I am still on my 2015 MacBook Pro. The only thing I wished had done with going with 16GB Memory instead of 8GB. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox does far better with many tabs. While Safari constantly for one reason or another reload every single in-active tabs which causes insane memory paging. Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer. And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.

distract8901 3y ago

I'm still using a 3rd gen i5 machine as my daily driver. It's only just now getting to the point that I'm thinking about upgrading. And even then, it's really only that I need more cores. Quad core just isn't cutting it for my C++ compilation. Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things