What are the available browsers for 128 MB of RAM PC?

Question

Running 12.04 with VirtualBox and I set it for 128MB of RAM. I cannot use more than 128MB of RAM.

Since the browsers I know like Firefox, Google Chrome and Chromium seem to eat more RAM, could somebody suggest me browsers which consumes low RAM?

Solution 1

what i know and close to what you want is midori , midori is a web browser that aims to be lightweight and fast.. go to ubuntu software center type midori and install it.

Solution 2

Text based web browser!

Definitely text based web browsers have limitations but running a more capable GUI web browser will also have limitations.

The main plus for a text based browser is that it will give you good speed/productivity in loading pages, scrolling pages, etc. The main minus for text based browser is you can't see images and many advanced websites won't display properly (or at all).

Here's some quick information about text based web browsers:

• List of text web browsers.
• Lynx looks pretty good from my 20,000ft view but I haven't used it.

Solution 3

There's yet another great option. Opera. Get that and turn on what it calls "Turbo boost". What this setting does is reduce the size of webpages from %30-%80 (hence load times and memory consumption) by processing reduced quality images that are slightly blurrier. You can also turn on an additional setting called "Load plugins only on demand" which is another setting that greatly reduces memory consumption by not running plugins on pages like Youtube except on your terms (you click a play button to allow it when you're ready).

If you're having trouble finding these options then google them. Opera has its own 'user's manual' kind of page explaining its settings and options and where to find them.

Solution 4

If midori still needs to much memory, you may test dillo.

Solution 5

Assuming you're interested on a graphical browser, you can try the Dillo browser, which is available on the dillo package (screenshots).

I don't think it supports JavaScript or plug-ins, I think it supports CSS and HTML 4 which should be fine for simple websites.

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Comments

[mx7]

Midori , ok how much RAM it can take ???

[mx7]

yeah lynx and elinks

[cauon]

Text based browsing provides indeed the lowest memory consumption that you you'll be able to get. But you can't test layouting and other graphical stuff with those. It all depends on what's the actual usecase.

[mx7]

could you provide me simple information RAM consumption ?

[FSMaxB]

Should be under 20MB (uses 6MB with the standard page shown after installation). Dillo is graphical but does not fully support html4

[mx7]

Oh ok ,currently moving with Links2

[Brendan Long]

Midori isn't really significantly smaller than other browsers like Firefox or Chrome. Any browser that can successfully render modern pages is going to use huge amounts of memory on them.

[Bob]

If you wanna visit any pages with ssl though, make sure to compile lynx with the --with-ssl option. If I recall correctly that should be ./configure --with-ssl

[Marco]

Text based browsers are great as a secondary browser. But many pages simply don't work (which is often due to bugs in the pages). Depending on what pages you are browsing it might work, but often it is impossible to access the content. So in practice text browsers are of limited use as primary browser.

[Jonathan Sexton]

Wanted to mention Opera is a web browser just so you know what you're looking for.

[Dan Dascalescu]

I've tested Midori and Firefox on Ubuntu 12.10 with the same 8 tabs open (Wikipedia, Streak.com, Google Finance etc.) and Firefox consumed less RAM (293MB) than Midori (310MB). On the other hand, as @Marco said, Midori itself takes only 15MB to start (no web page open).

[Andrea Lazzarotto]

That's not even available for Linux!