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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
by 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....