8 ms·

The world of low spec hardware really does need faster, lighter browsers. Too many times now have I configured an SBC, RPi, or even a laptop that’s just a few

by heads 3y ago

The world of low spec hardware really does need faster, lighter browsers. Too many times now have I configured an SBC, RPi, or even a laptop that’s just a few years old and been disappointed that, while everything else is wonderful and fast and smooth looking, it is browser performance that is the one thing holding me back. I am resigned to the fact that some of my requirements really do mean I need a Ryzen 7 with 16GB of RAM. Sadly my biggest compute loads are for MS Teams and webmail.

tentacleuno 3y ago
> MS Teams I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0]. I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable. I'm curious how Slack performs; perhaps they're not trying harder because there's no[t much] competition in this space ...? [0]: (If I remember correctly, they were using AngularJS at the time, but I'm sure they're now using the regular React stack.)
- niutech 3y ago
  For a lightweight MS Teams experience, try: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli (terminal client), https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard (both Slack & Teams) or https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams (plugin for Pidgin).
  - rjzzleep 3y ago
    A little reminder from the past eh? I had to sigh when I read that. I guess purple somewhat died when the companies started banning accounts left and right for using third party clients for using their services. In a few cases it also seems like those bans started happening, because companies wanted to shut down third party clients to make sure people can't bypass ads, but also unfortunately to keep them from harvesting data. I kinda have to ask, what features can you enforce in rate limiting in a first party client that you can't enforce in a third party client?
  - creesch 3y ago
    While it is neat that people work on them, realistically these are not replacements for people wishing to have a lighter teams experience. - Non of them are close to feature complete. As soon as you have to do more than chat (share files, do meetings, etc) they will let you down. - In most corporate environments there is some extra layer of authentication involved I highly doubt these clients are able to handle. The best way I have found to have a lighter teams experience is to simply use the web version as a PWA. This basically offers you all the features without the extended footprint of effectively running a second browser.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of the team(s) that develop Teams would reveal a lot. I doubt we can blame the tools they use.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of organizations that elect to use Teams would reveal a lot, also.
- akokanka 3y ago
  Yup. It's slow buggy. Tends to go into infinite loops. Sad really that it slows corporates so much.
- chmod775 3y ago
  > I'm curious how Slack performs My colleagues and myself used Slack for years, were forced to use Teams for about 2 years because of our new parent company, and finally went back to Slack after we collectively quit that shitshow to start a new company. While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    > While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better. We switched from HipChat to Google Chat, which in my mind is pretty bad. Customers are often on Teams, which somehow manages to be MUCH MUCH worse. People kept telling me that Slack is much better than either Google Chat or MS Team, but after using it I can't say that I'd agree. Teams is clearly the worst, Slack is awful in its own way and Google Chat manages to be the best of the three, but mostly because the two others are so terrible. It's clearly not an easy problem to solve, but I do wonder why all of these "enterprise" messaging/meeting/chat platforms are so terrible.
    - smallerfish 3y ago
      Twist is better still than Slack - they force everything into threads, so it becomes a reasonably browsable experience, and therefore possible to maintain async comms with. Slack still wins on integrations, though Twist has a few (including Zapier).
      - pmontra 3y ago
        How do you find the thread with the conversation you need to carry on? That's the problem with Slack. Slack threads is where information goes to hide and die. "Ah, you did answer that two days ago? Where?"
        smallerfish 3y ago
        There are two levels of organization - channels and threads, so it's not too bad to browse if reasonably setup. It also gives you an inbox with all of your unread threads, so that you can catch up quickly; and, you can mark a thread unread if you want to punt on it after reading.
- bArray 3y ago
  > > MS Teams > I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0]. Teams for Linux [1] also struggles with resources. Teams in general is an absolute mess. I would go further and say that most MS products are resource intensive buggy crap. [1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
  - Snow_Falls 3y ago
    That's an unfair characterisation, sometimes they're actively user hostile instead of just poorly designed.
    - bArray 3y ago
      One of my favourite ongoing jokes is Word, the program that exists for typing, 'randomly' deletes what you type: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-version-auto-deletes-text/m-p/3703643 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-stop-word-online-from-deleting-my-edits/4c405b05-c2f4-473e-9618-f0a7458317ba https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-t... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-does-word-online-keep-deleting-whole-lines-of/d7809516-f080-4a49-a0c9-5ba456e75964 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-d... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-365-deleting-text-as-i-type-not-overwrite/84d51d9f-adc3-40c3-9224-892daab72f98 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-disappearing-and-reappearing-while-typing-ms/e8419e98-6e79-42bd-bd95-5363699ab545 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-keeps-deleting-on-its-own-help/a1233a70-7a6c-4ce5-b57b-ad58826c0efc https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-365-deleting-text-as-i-type-not-overwrite/e81ac347-b4ba-4b6a-a1a0-fddd11be338c https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-typing-in-microsoft-word-online-it-deletes/fdff8a6f-0d26-476c-9ee0-99ca23405ac2 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-keeps-deleting-lines-of-my-text-help/6a0327e5-ef8f-4ab7-b1cf-868bebe1832b https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-is-word-on-microsoft-365-randomly-deleting-my/7ea7a86e-a91e-42ee-9e7a-80be8aab02f3 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-i... I have no idea how many engineers work on Office Online, but other than security bugs I cannot think of a more important issue to resolve.
- pmontra 3y ago
  > I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable Their customers find it acceptable so it's OK for MS too. If customers wouldn't find it acceptable they would use something else and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Maybe it helps that it comes with the Office suite and they already paid for it. By the way, when a customer asks me how I want to do a video chat, almost always with screen sharing, I suggest Meet. If they mandate Teams, OK, I'll do Teams in a browser. Actually the best screen sharing seems to be Skype. It can zoom too. None of them can go full screen with no useless UI around the shared screen, tough luck. None of my customers are using Zoom anymore.
bombcar 3y ago
It’s sad. I have clear memories of browsing the web quite capably with windows 98 and 64MB of RAM (or less!) and now we can’t even do it with gigabytes.
- niutech 3y ago
  You can still browse the web using Opera 12.18, which takes a little memory, but the HTML5 support will be poor. The web has evolved since then.
  - rasz 3y ago
    Opera 12 source code leaked, so you could even port it to new platforms. Sadly multiple exploits, html5, and finally licensing make it a dead end :(.
    - userbinator 3y ago
      Licensing is the only real problem, but that never stopped people from doing things either.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      Opera really should have open source Presto when they switched to Blink.
  - forgotpwd16 3y ago
    For some reason Linux users never got an update to 12.18 or 12.17. Latest one was 12.16.
- creesch 3y ago
  To be fair, that was also a much lighter web. Even if you remove all the heavy javascript overload modern webpages will be heavier simply due to higher resolution images and other media. It also highly depends on what you want to browse. HN for example will work just fine without much memory. Expecting YouTube to be as light as 90s websites is asking a bit much. Having said that, I do agree that we have overshot, and many websites are way too heavy for their use case. Sticking with YouTube as an example, assuming for a moment that whatever device you are using does have hardware decoding, so video playback isn't dragging down performance. It still is an extremely heavy website due to all the tracking shenanigans, interactive elements and the fact that it is an SPA based design. Alternative front-ends like invidious show it is possible and in the past Google did actually provide light versions of many of their web apps specifically for this sort of use case. Sadly that is no longer the case.
niutech 3y ago
Check out more lightweight web browsers: NetSurf, Pale Moon, K-Meleon on Goanna, Otter Browser, Ultralight, as well as terminal apps: Carbonyl, Browsh, Links (it has a graphical mode too).
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  When you run a chromium in headless mode it doesn't make the browser any lighter. I think what the OP means is that you need to have a browser with the most important JS and CSS functionality to render modern websites, but without all the junk on top of it. qutebrowser and nyxt would fit the bill better. to be honest I feel like nyxt is really cool, but I'm not sure if choosing a lisp was the right idea.
  - niutech 3y ago
    You can install Carbonyl in a VPS and use my Carbonyl Terminal (https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal) as a thin client for it.
  - rubymamis 3y ago
    qutebrowser binary is 424MB (on macOS, at least). Is that considered light?
    - Mr_Minderbinder 3y ago
      Well my (un-googled) Chromium installation takes up 254MB, and I use that as my "big/corporate" browser so I would definitely not consider that light.
    - rjzzleep 3y ago
      qutebrowser uses a qt-webengine library in the background, which is also basically a full chromium rendering engine, where not all features are exposed to the UI. It's only light in terms of UI. Just like a headless Chromium is only light on the UI side of things.
- subtra3t 3y ago
prmoustache 3y ago
This is gross exageration. A fairly decent low end desktop/laptop CPU with 4GB of RAM is enough to run MS Teams, and I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.
- Krssst 3y ago
  > I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs. Search on webmail is instantaneous. It was not on MTAs last time I tried. I remember someone always struggling to find old mails with his MTA while gmail would find it quite quickly.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Search is instantaneous on my gnome evolution MTA.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Mutt with cached email it's uber fast. Also, your mail inbox it's yours, forever.
- anthk 3y ago
  Something must be really wrong when you need a 4GB machine to basically run Kopete/Pidgin+inline plugins at HD resolutions.

by heads 3y ago

tentacleuno 3y ago

> MS Teams I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0]. I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable. I'm curious how Slack performs; perhaps they're not trying harder because there's no[t much] competition in this space ...? [0]: (If I remember correctly, they were using AngularJS at the time, but I'm sure they're now using the regular React stack.)

niutech 3y ago
For a lightweight MS Teams experience, try: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli (terminal client), https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard (both Slack & Teams) or https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams (plugin for Pidgin).
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  A little reminder from the past eh? I had to sigh when I read that. I guess purple somewhat died when the companies started banning accounts left and right for using third party clients for using their services. In a few cases it also seems like those bans started happening, because companies wanted to shut down third party clients to make sure people can't bypass ads, but also unfortunately to keep them from harvesting data. I kinda have to ask, what features can you enforce in rate limiting in a first party client that you can't enforce in a third party client?
- creesch 3y ago
  While it is neat that people work on them, realistically these are not replacements for people wishing to have a lighter teams experience. - Non of them are close to feature complete. As soon as you have to do more than chat (share files, do meetings, etc) they will let you down. - In most corporate environments there is some extra layer of authentication involved I highly doubt these clients are able to handle. The best way I have found to have a lighter teams experience is to simply use the web version as a PWA. This basically offers you all the features without the extended footprint of effectively running a second browser.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of the team(s) that develop Teams would reveal a lot. I doubt we can blame the tools they use.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of organizations that elect to use Teams would reveal a lot, also.
akokanka 3y ago
Yup. It's slow buggy. Tends to go into infinite loops. Sad really that it slows corporates so much.
chmod775 3y ago
> I'm curious how Slack performs My colleagues and myself used Slack for years, were forced to use Teams for about 2 years because of our new parent company, and finally went back to Slack after we collectively quit that shitshow to start a new company. While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better. We switched from HipChat to Google Chat, which in my mind is pretty bad. Customers are often on Teams, which somehow manages to be MUCH MUCH worse. People kept telling me that Slack is much better than either Google Chat or MS Team, but after using it I can't say that I'd agree. Teams is clearly the worst, Slack is awful in its own way and Google Chat manages to be the best of the three, but mostly because the two others are so terrible. It's clearly not an easy problem to solve, but I do wonder why all of these "enterprise" messaging/meeting/chat platforms are so terrible.
  - smallerfish 3y ago
    Twist is better still than Slack - they force everything into threads, so it becomes a reasonably browsable experience, and therefore possible to maintain async comms with. Slack still wins on integrations, though Twist has a few (including Zapier).
    - pmontra 3y ago
      How do you find the thread with the conversation you need to carry on? That's the problem with Slack. Slack threads is where information goes to hide and die. "Ah, you did answer that two days ago? Where?"
      - smallerfish 3y ago
        There are two levels of organization - channels and threads, so it's not too bad to browse if reasonably setup. It also gives you an inbox with all of your unread threads, so that you can catch up quickly; and, you can mark a thread unread if you want to punt on it after reading.
bArray 3y ago
> > MS Teams > I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0]. Teams for Linux [1] also struggles with resources. Teams in general is an absolute mess. I would go further and say that most MS products are resource intensive buggy crap. [1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  That's an unfair characterisation, sometimes they're actively user hostile instead of just poorly designed.
  - bArray 3y ago
    One of my favourite ongoing jokes is Word, the program that exists for typing, 'randomly' deletes what you type: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-version-auto-deletes-text/m-p/3703643 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-stop-word-online-from-deleting-my-edits/4c405b05-c2f4-473e-9618-f0a7458317ba https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-t... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-does-word-online-keep-deleting-whole-lines-of/d7809516-f080-4a49-a0c9-5ba456e75964 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-d... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-365-deleting-text-as-i-type-not-overwrite/84d51d9f-adc3-40c3-9224-892daab72f98 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-disappearing-and-reappearing-while-typing-ms/e8419e98-6e79-42bd-bd95-5363699ab545 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-keeps-deleting-on-its-own-help/a1233a70-7a6c-4ce5-b57b-ad58826c0efc https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-365-deleting-text-as-i-type-not-overwrite/e81ac347-b4ba-4b6a-a1a0-fddd11be338c https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-typing-in-microsoft-word-online-it-deletes/fdff8a6f-0d26-476c-9ee0-99ca23405ac2 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-keeps-deleting-lines-of-my-text-help/6a0327e5-ef8f-4ab7-b1cf-868bebe1832b https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-is-word-on-microsoft-365-randomly-deleting-my/7ea7a86e-a91e-42ee-9e7a-80be8aab02f3 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-i... I have no idea how many engineers work on Office Online, but other than security bugs I cannot think of a more important issue to resolve.
pmontra 3y ago
> I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable Their customers find it acceptable so it's OK for MS too. If customers wouldn't find it acceptable they would use something else and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Maybe it helps that it comes with the Office suite and they already paid for it. By the way, when a customer asks me how I want to do a video chat, almost always with screen sharing, I suggest Meet. If they mandate Teams, OK, I'll do Teams in a browser. Actually the best screen sharing seems to be Skype. It can zoom too. None of them can go full screen with no useless UI around the shared screen, tough luck. None of my customers are using Zoom anymore.

bombcar 3y ago

It’s sad. I have clear memories of browsing the web quite capably with windows 98 and 64MB of RAM (or less!) and now we can’t even do it with gigabytes.

niutech 3y ago
You can still browse the web using Opera 12.18, which takes a little memory, but the HTML5 support will be poor. The web has evolved since then.
- rasz 3y ago
  Opera 12 source code leaked, so you could even port it to new platforms. Sadly multiple exploits, html5, and finally licensing make it a dead end :(.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Licensing is the only real problem, but that never stopped people from doing things either.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    Opera really should have open source Presto when they switched to Blink.
- forgotpwd16 3y ago
  For some reason Linux users never got an update to 12.18 or 12.17. Latest one was 12.16.
creesch 3y ago
To be fair, that was also a much lighter web. Even if you remove all the heavy javascript overload modern webpages will be heavier simply due to higher resolution images and other media. It also highly depends on what you want to browse. HN for example will work just fine without much memory. Expecting YouTube to be as light as 90s websites is asking a bit much. Having said that, I do agree that we have overshot, and many websites are way too heavy for their use case. Sticking with YouTube as an example, assuming for a moment that whatever device you are using does have hardware decoding, so video playback isn't dragging down performance. It still is an extremely heavy website due to all the tracking shenanigans, interactive elements and the fact that it is an SPA based design. Alternative front-ends like invidious show it is possible and in the past Google did actually provide light versions of many of their web apps specifically for this sort of use case. Sadly that is no longer the case.

niutech 3y ago

Check out more lightweight web browsers: NetSurf, Pale Moon, K-Meleon on Goanna, Otter Browser, Ultralight, as well as terminal apps: Carbonyl, Browsh, Links (it has a graphical mode too).

rjzzleep 3y ago
When you run a chromium in headless mode it doesn't make the browser any lighter. I think what the OP means is that you need to have a browser with the most important JS and CSS functionality to render modern websites, but without all the junk on top of it. qutebrowser and nyxt would fit the bill better. to be honest I feel like nyxt is really cool, but I'm not sure if choosing a lisp was the right idea.
- niutech 3y ago
  You can install Carbonyl in a VPS and use my Carbonyl Terminal (https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal) as a thin client for it.
- rubymamis 3y ago
  qutebrowser binary is 424MB (on macOS, at least). Is that considered light?
  - Mr_Minderbinder 3y ago
    Well my (un-googled) Chromium installation takes up 254MB, and I use that as my "big/corporate" browser so I would definitely not consider that light.
  - rjzzleep 3y ago
    qutebrowser uses a qt-webengine library in the background, which is also basically a full chromium rendering engine, where not all features are exposed to the UI. It's only light in terms of UI. Just like a headless Chromium is only light on the UI side of things.
subtra3t 3y ago

prmoustache 3y ago

This is gross exageration. A fairly decent low end desktop/laptop CPU with 4GB of RAM is enough to run MS Teams, and I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.

Krssst 3y ago
> I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs. Search on webmail is instantaneous. It was not on MTAs last time I tried. I remember someone always struggling to find old mails with his MTA while gmail would find it quite quickly.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Search is instantaneous on my gnome evolution MTA.
- anthk 3y ago
  Mutt with cached email it's uber fast. Also, your mail inbox it's yours, forever.
anthk 3y ago
Something must be really wrong when you need a 4GB machine to basically run Kopete/Pidgin+inline plugins at HD resolutions.