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Using my Raspberry Pi 4, I find that interestingly enough, even just using the SD card slot on 1 GB of RAM, device usability is perfectly good. As soon as I ne

Using my Raspberry Pi 4, I find that interestingly enough, even just using the SD card slot on 1 GB of RAM, device usability is perfectly good. As soon as I need to use a web browser, performance goes out the window, and you're nearly stranded in terms of usability. I think that easily qualifies as "desktop usage," and it leaves this desire for a low resource consumption web browser.

bitwize 2y ago
This is why I install netsurf on all my Pis. "But bitwize," you say, "netsurf doesn't support JavaScript!" To which I reply, "Oh no! Anyway..."
JohnBooty 2y ago
desire for a low resource consumption web browser. What we really want is low resource consumption web content, right? When you pull up the browser's debugger and look at what a "modern" mainstream web page/app needs to deal with... you can see there's little hope for a low power device. Megabytes upon megabytes of obfuscated javascript, from multiple sources, nearly all of it needing decompression and decryption. Using my Raspberry Pi 4 The Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) I recently got is actually very close to tolerable for web browsing and running VSCode. (I realize VSCode is kind of a pig. I'm just kind of experimenting to see what might be viable) I run Firefox with uBlock, which seems to help somewhat. Total RAM usage with FF and VSCode according to htop is close to 4GB so I suspect that your 1GB Pi is running into swap once you start tooling around the interwebs with a web browser. Upgrading from an A1 SD card to a A2 SD seems to make something of a palpable difference in "desktop usability." Certainly the benchmark scores for the A2 card blow the A1 away. I've only had the Pi for a few weeks so I haven't experimented with more aggressive web optimization stuff, like switching my user-agent to request mobile versions or running a Pi-hole, etc. I'm also running at 4K native, so.... changing that certainly might help too....
necovek 2y ago
Web browsers are merely platforms to run web apps in. Does the same happen if you visit a couple of "plain HTML" web sites?

bitwize 2y ago

This is why I install netsurf on all my Pis. "But bitwize," you say, "netsurf doesn't support JavaScript!" To which I reply, "Oh no! Anyway..."

JohnBooty 2y ago

desire for a low resource consumption web browser. What we really want is low resource consumption web content, right? When you pull up the browser's debugger and look at what a "modern" mainstream web page/app needs to deal with... you can see there's little hope for a low power device. Megabytes upon megabytes of obfuscated javascript, from multiple sources, nearly all of it needing decompression and decryption. Using my Raspberry Pi 4 The Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) I recently got is actually very close to tolerable for web browsing and running VSCode. (I realize VSCode is kind of a pig. I'm just kind of experimenting to see what might be viable) I run Firefox with uBlock, which seems to help somewhat. Total RAM usage with FF and VSCode according to htop is close to 4GB so I suspect that your 1GB Pi is running into swap once you start tooling around the interwebs with a web browser. Upgrading from an A1 SD card to a A2 SD seems to make something of a palpable difference in "desktop usability." Certainly the benchmark scores for the A2 card blow the A1 away. I've only had the Pi for a few weeks so I haven't experimented with more aggressive web optimization stuff, like switching my user-agent to request mobile versions or running a Pi-hole, etc. I'm also running at 4K native, so.... changing that certainly might help too....

necovek 2y ago

Web browsers are merely platforms to run web apps in. Does the same happen if you visit a couple of "plain HTML" web sites?