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Comment by samtheprogram | Hacker News Reader

Ironically (because related to Google), I feel that the constant churn of web development is what makes these older devices unusable.

I have several devices from early to mid 2010's, and the real reason these devices are annoying to unbearable to impossible to use (assuming Linux or Windows for security updates) is that they become very slow while just browsing the web or simply playing a video with a newer codec that has no hardware support on these older machines.

In my mind, this 10 years of updates is fantastic, but also not very practical towards the end of the support cycle. Better to have the option, though.

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Even going as far back as Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad, while running Linux or even mildly debloated Win10, as long as it’s been outfitted with an SSD it’s not immediately obvious I’m using a 15+ year old machine until I have to open a web browser. These machines are perfectly usable outside of the boundlessly hungry entity that is the web.

If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.

As of a couple of years ago, I was using a mid-naughts iMac with Linux installed for a number of projects. It was fine for basic scripting, data analysis, and shell-based Web access.

A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.

(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)

That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.

Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.

And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.

Interesting. I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 10+ year old thinkbook with 16G in it (they were only sold with 8 at the time but replacing the two 4G modules with 8G modules worked, 16G does not seem to work).

Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.

modern browsers don't really keep hundreds of tabs open, they just keep a place holder and then return the memory back to the system as resources get low. I'm not sure why people think a browser can keep 100s of webpages open when modern webpages (tabs) often use 100MB->1GB of memory.

Browser memory management has been improving, but when that system was last running, let's just say that things were bad.

SSD or HDD?

16 GB would be about 8-16x what the system I'm describing had.

How are you blacklisting sites? Pihole/DNS, or something within Firefox itself?

1 or 2 GB of RAM? Yeah, that would've been the problem. Old CPUs can handle more than people think but there's absolutely no getting away from modern memory demands.

Yeah. 8GB of ram is pretty much the minimum usable amount these days. If you can get 8GB into an older machine (with an SSD), then it should work fine.

But 4GB? Pass.

I have a Lenovo Chromebook with 4GB and GalliumOS and it is still very capable with the latest Firefox.

With the right distro, 4GB with just a HDD is quite fine for Chromebook style usage.

This is why AMP HTML was forced by Google - to make websites faster and more lightweight.

One solution is to use uBlock Origin, disable JS on most websites and whitelist it only for those which really need it.

Another is to use a textual web browser in the cloud, such as Carbonyl Terminal: https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal

Yeah something that old is gonna be heavily memory restricted, javascript chews through memory like nobody's business, then you start swapping and it's game over.

Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance.

This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.

To aggressively speed up internet just block JavaScript. I use this extension which makes it easy and convenient:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.

It's also very noticeable on smartphones. My phone is as snappy with native apps as when I first bought it, but every year the ridiculous amount of CPU time and memory it takes to render a basic news article increases. The last time I did upgrade phones it was specifically to get more RAM, as I was finding that modern web pages were so hungry that switching to tab n was almost always evicting tab n-1, necessitating lots of reloads if I was cross-referencing information. And that was on a Nexus 6, not a budget phone, and only a few years after its release

Have had similar experiences on iPhones. Multiple native apps can stay in memory and play nice with each other for indefinite periods, but then I need to go visit a heavy website for some reason or another and it starts booting apps out of memory. It’s ridiculous.

I'm still using a 3rd gen i5 machine as my daily driver. It's only just now getting to the point that I'm thinking about upgrading. And even then, it's really only that I need more cores. Quad core just isn't cutting it for my C++ compilation.

Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things

At home, I am still on my 2015 MacBook Pro. The only thing I wished had done with going with 16GB Memory instead of 8GB. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox does far better with many tabs. While Safari constantly for one reason or another reload every single in-active tabs which causes insane memory paging.

Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer.

And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.

I had a Macbook 12" for a while and it was fantastic. However YouTube brought it to a crawl, as did Google Maps. Everything else rant quite fine.

Generally speaking I'd suggest installing Firefox on older devices.

It's usually at least slightly more usable as long as you don't have too many tabs open.

I'd also recommend Firefox in general but that's neither here or there.

On a slightly newer machine (3 years old, 32GB memory) Firefox (or rather LibreWolf) again runs nicely with a few hundred tabs.

It would probably run fine with that amount of tabs also if it had 16 or maybe 8 GB, but not together with 2 or 3 IDE instancee, Teams, Slack and ome or more applications running in debug.

I have absolutely zero issues on 10 year old hardware with 16GByte of memory. Hundreds of tabs (Firefox is really good about moving them out of memory when they don't get used for a while - which, lets be honest, are almost all of those tabs) and the normal everyday onslaught of office software, a fat IDE, and a CAD editor.

This stuff is not rocket science. It's not even performance gaming. We worked efficiently in 2013, and it still works today. All it takes is some memory and a halfway decent SSD.

It bloody well should though, 32G is massive.

Sort of - but completely normal for a developer's desktop circa 2013, even without paying the Xeon tax.

Of course, a high school at that time might have purchased poverty-spec chromebooks with 4GB of RAM for understandable reasons of price.

So when samtheprogram talks about "devices from early to mid 2010's" that could mean a great many things.

Slowdown can also be due to the soldered NAND flash slowly wearing out - not necessarily because the device is underpowered.

Certainly the Nexus 7 (2012) had that problem (became completely unusably slow after a few years) and I am sure I have seen the same issue with other devices (Android phones and one iPad I had).

My daily driver is a system76 from 2015 and it works perfectly fine. However, I plan to replace it with a 16" framework so I can ditch my desktop and use the laptop for gaming.

8 year old _desktop_ computers (that have anywhere from 3 to 6x more watts hitting the CPU) are one thing. Also consider whether your machine has a dedicated GPU. A Chromebook or other budget-to-mid-range laptop from 2015 would have a different experience, although I'm sure they're still usable.

I was daily driving a 2009 MacBook Pro for a while in 2018. It was... fine, especially as a Vim user, but if someone else used my computer, they would most certainly comment or complain with normal web browsing.

I'm writing this comment on a 2011 MacBook Pro (admittedly a fast machine at the time) with a busted graphics chip, running current Linux and Firefox, and my experience of the web is basically fine, including video. Some JS-heavy app-like sites are slow, but those are slow on my monster truck of an office workstation too.

(Self plug)

We senselessly use RIAs for everything

https://www.radicalsimpli.city/

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