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.
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.
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.
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?
But 4GB? Pass.
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
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...
Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.
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
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.