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Lightweight Browsers
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Introduction
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Modern day desktops have blazingly fast processors and gigabytes of RAM and oodles of applications can be run at a time. Speaking of applications, when it comes to web browsers the primary chioce gets usually shortlisted into any one of these: Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer for most of them. But you may be baffled while running the above megabrowsers on your low end system’s and naturally is out of question if you want to have a well balanced computing environment. Sometimes you just wish to browse through various sites peacefully or you may want to run multiple applications while browsing or you don’t want your RAM to be overloaded or just want your CPU to be relieved a little bit of its chores (considering you don’t have a graphics card installed). These lightweight browsers could well be your redeemer here. Some may not fully support the standards of the WorldWideWeb consortium and complicated HTML, javascript, CSS elements but these browsers play a very useful and important role for faster, lighter and more casual browsing experience in our daily lives. |
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Discussion
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K-Meleon also supports a decent number of extensions to increase the flexibility of the browser. K-Meleon implements mouse gestures that makes your browsing experience more comfortable. Managing and organising bookmarks is very easy and they can be imported and organized well in folders. The privacy options lets the user to be safe and clear any sensitive data that may be stored and K-Meleon lets you to manage cookies, login data, history, cache, referrers, user agent string and prefetching link addresses as well as implements encrypted transmission and storage. There is also an endless list of search engines by default in K-meleon and which can be added at will and also has a built-in RSS reader. You can filter the contents of webpages through CSS rules for ad-blocking. K-Meleon utilizes its cache very well and was the fastest to load webpages for consecutive times. The browser has been a pleasure to use and is the best bet on old hardware because of it being extremely light. Though the abundance of options in K-Meleon would interest any advanced user to lean against it, the browser has been made to rot without any significant updates for quite some time.
The user interface is minimal which can be changed by using application styles icon. The browser is also customizable with options to show/hide buttons, toolbars, relocate navigation bar and bookmarks, even undock them to desktop. The browser supports FTP browsing and downloading as well as have a built-in torrent client. The browser also supports mouse gestures, keyboard and mouse shortcuts (can be studied from new tab page) and open/play audio, video content in external applications. I love QTWeb, especially because of its privacy and security. The browser being highly portable is a single button click away for turning on private browsing. It even runs in a limited Windows environment or directly from USB. There are options to 1. reset the browser(clear history, back to defaults etc) and 2. full reset (back to clean state). There is also an inbuilt adblocker which can be customized to block those nasty ads. There are also additional useful options like Auto-Fill support, web inspector to inspect html elements and reduce load times, virtual keyboard support etc. Though, there is an occasional rise in memory consumption, the browser is still extremely lightweight and is a small 6MB download.
Midori (Japanese for green) is a web browser that aims to be lightweight and fast. It uses the WebKit rendering engine and the GTK+ 2 interface. Midori is part of the Xfce desktop environment's Goodies component.It is the default browser in elementary OS and the BodhiLinux distribution as well as Trisquel Mini.
Arora is a lightweight cross-platform web browser. It runs on Linux, embedded Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows, Haiku, and any other platforms supported by the Qt toolkit.Arora uses the QtWebKit port of the fully standards-compliant WebKit layout engine. It features fast rendering, powerful JavaScript engine and supports Netscape plugins.
Avant Browser is an ultra-fast web browser. Its user-friendly interface brings a new level of clarity and efficiency to your browsing experience, and frequent upgrades have steadily improved its reliability. Avant Browser is the lowest memory usage web browser on Windows platform (website claim).
QupZilla is a lightweight multiplatform web browser written in Qt Framework (same as QtWeb browser) and using its web rendering core QtWebKit. It features SpeedDial extension and integrated AdBlocker and uses native widgets style with a unified library for bookmarks, history, rss and the like.
Columbus is a smart and powerful web-browser with many useful built-in features. It has the ability to search for a particular file you want to download, directly on all popular torrent sites and offers a quick, reliable access to Web content, ease-up your downloading habits or help you with your online work.
GreenBrowser is based upon the Trident rendering engine used in Internet Explorer. GreenBrowser is a full-featured powerful and flexible browser, highly-customizable but compact in size and low in memory requirements.GreenBrowser is similar to Maxthon and closely related to the MyIE browser.
TheWorld Browser is a tiny, fast, secure and powerful web browser created by Phoenix Studio. It a multi-tab and multi-window web browser. It is completely free and there is no function limitation. It has no bundled software, so it can be uninstalled totally.
SlimBrowser is a free web browser for Windows that is blazing fast, most secure and fully loaded with powerful features. It starts up quickly and opens web pages right in front of you with minimum delay. It is designed to let you browse the Internet safely by guarding your personal information and protecting your privacy. |
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Two of the better ones for me, for being resonable able to render most sites, are Arora and Flashpeak.
Avant Browser is a good choice.
Hi George.J ! I thought you might be interested in a new lightweight browser I found called Wipeout. This browser is free, runs from .exe file & is portable. It is also self cleaning & can be run with Sandboxie for added security. The best part of Wipout is its simplicity. This is only 1mb. No install. One-click delete & no History. There's even a panic button! This is deffinitly worth you time in checking it out & can be found at Wipeout.net
Wipeout with Ask.com as the default search engine?! No thanks!
Its similar to Browzar. This also is basically just an IE shell.
But actively developed :) . It's interface is slicker than Browzar, has no menu bar and is more like Chrome. Also there are 15 channels of sports, dating, cars,gadgets etc and claims that it's a "Guy's Browser". But in Browzar there is an additional option "Secure Cleanup", where even expert knowledge may not be enough to recover deleted files but takes longer time. Not essentially needed for everyday use but useful.
What I'm confused with is that I downloaded WipeOut from Softpedia and the version is 1.0.1.3 Nov 18 and when I loaded the browser it said "update available" and upgraded to 1.0.2.0 Sep28! 2 months before Softpedia version but newer. Was Softpedia late in adding it to the database or what?
GreenBrowser still has features from 2002 that are not available in any of the main browsers - IE, Chrome, Opera etc. The most useful is to be able to get a list of all the links on a page and sort them in various ways before either saving them or opening selected ones.
Its a fantastic no. 2 browser (for its features) but its like IE in that its slow.
I've been using QupZilla on Bodhi Linux for the past few days and it's very good indeed. Yes it has crashed a couple of times but I can forgive it that. Really like the built in Ad/Flash block and it's super fast.
Anyone here have recent experience with SlimBrowser? I have a 6 year old XP desktop and am looking for the lightest, fastest browser. Thank You
Should say that Opera is also really lightweight and uses less CPU. It works really fast and smooth on my low end desktop with 256MB RAM. Pretty impressive. I wonder how it could be included in this article considering that it's already mentioned in Mega Browsers section.
Well, on my low-end desktop, both QTWeb and k-meleon take twice as long to load as Chrome, and prowling around Task manager shows about the same resources used. I'll stick with Chrome I think.
Low end? What's your system specs? QTweb has near instant startup on low end PC's and the resource usage of Chrome spikes as the number of tabs increases because each tab separates as a process. Also if you look at the resource usage tables Chrome falls at the bottom of the pack among mega browsers too http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-web-browser.htm though it shines in memory management.
If you are working with just one tab throughout your browsing period, none of these browsers won't have much effect to your PC and you'll be safe.
Hi George
Win 7 Home premium 64 bit SP1, Intel E2200 2.2GHz, 4 Gb DDR2 RAM, 512 mb GeForce 8400, a couple of Tb across 2 hard disks. Nothing fancy, all a few years old. I'm just timing by counting seconds out loud, no stopwatch (we're pretty primitive up here in Australia), but Chrome loads in about half the time. Sometime soon I'll run some tests on my Asus eee netbook (2 gb RAM under XP) and see what happens there.
Cheers
Glenn
Your system specs is way too good to see significant differences in memory and CPU usage. You need to have a PC that has less than 512MB RAM, ideally for computers having 256MB or 386MB RAM. Firefox and Chrome are nearly unusable with more than 4 tabs opened on these systems. I have a low end system, specifically to test these kind of browsers. (A desktop with WinXP, Pentium IV CPU, 256MB RAM, 2GHz processor).
I just installed QTWeb browser. I first set my home page to CNN and then Yahoo.Regardless, when I first open the browser it quickly opens to the QtWeb for a second or so page then just as quickly opens to and stays on my set homepage. This is annoying. It should immediately open to my choice of homepage. Any ideas on how to remedy it? Thank You
I tried the same. What I feel is that QtWeb uses this feature for faster startup. And the page you're seeing is not QtWeb homepage but about:blank page. You see the same page when opening new tabs also. When a browser starts to about:blank page, the browser loads faster and consumes lesser memory. But this hinderance is only for fraction of a second and you'll be redirected your desired homepage.
Are QTweb browser and K-Meleon both compatible with Sandboxie? Also anyone know when K Meleon will be updated? It is waaayyyy past.
I use K-meleon sandboxed. Sandboxie will run whatever you choose as your default browser sandboxed. If it's not your default browser, right click it and choose to run sandboxed.
Thanks for your info! Have you found KM much faster than other browsers? Also what about any upcoming updates?
It is much quicker than anything else I've tried on the old laptop running XP that I use it on. Miles behind ff, chrome etc on features, looks etc. But if it's speed you're after, definitely worth a try. I don't use it that much tbh though as I mainly use BodhiLinux nowadays.
As far as when the next release is, the thread below from the K-Meleon forum may or may not shed some light on that.
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/forum/read.php?8,118531
Concur about BodhiLinux. Now my OS of choice. Fast, stable, safe and supported in a language I can understand :)
Yes, Sandboxie should run with any web browser without much issues. If you want to check the known conflicts of Sandboxie with other programs here's a list http://www.sandboxie.com/index.php?KnownConflicts
Thanks George for a speedy reply.
Orca browser is also a lightweight.
Orca Browser is like Avant for Firefox, from the developer of Avant Browser. But it seems like it hasn't been updated for quite a while now. Last one seems to be way back in Dec 2009 and no beta versions have been out since. Anyway let me take a look at it.
edit:Orca Browser is no longer in development. It seems as if development have been shifted in favour of Avant.So it won't be featured in this page.
Tried all of them except Midori. Old slow system 2003 vintage. K Meleon best by some distance tho I like QT web as well
How about the Lunascape? Isn't a lightweight browser?
The World Browser is no longer being developed.
Last version is from February 2010.
K-Meleon is also nearly dead...last beta is from December 2010.
Isn't K Meleon nearing a new release? I thought I read that somewhere but cant remember where. Anyway it is past time for one.
--"The World Browser is no longer being developed.Last version is from February 2010"--
Support of IE9 kernel and various fixes have been implemented in its latest release 3.4.0.5 (April 11 2011) http://www.softpedia.com/progChangelog/TheWorld-Browser-Changelog-70722....
K-Melon 1.7 alpha2 development is in progress but is not yet officially out. It’s true that some of these browsers have crawling development, yet they are the best bets on systems like Win98, 2000 and even XP in resource consumption.
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