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The world of low spec hardware really does need faster, lighter browsers. Too many times now have I configured an SBC, RPi, or even a laptop that’s just a few years old and been disappointed that, while everything else is wonderful and fast and smooth looking, it is browser performance that is the one thing holding me back.

I am resigned to the fact that some of my requirements really do mean I need a Ryzen 7 with 16GB of RAM. Sadly my biggest compute loads are for MS Teams and webmail.

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> MS Teams

I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0].

I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable. I'm curious how Slack performs; perhaps they're not trying harder because there's no[t much] competition in this space ...?

[0]: (If I remember correctly, they were using AngularJS at the time, but I'm sure they're now using the regular React stack.)

> > MS Teams

> I really do empathize here, after having to use Teams for around 2 years. It's amazingly slow, confusing, buggy (it would crash the tab quite regularly), and just generally a perfect role model for what software shouldn't be[0].

Teams for Linux [1] also struggles with resources. Teams in general is an absolute mess. I would go further and say that most MS products are resource intensive buggy crap.

[1] https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

That's an unfair characterisation, sometimes they're actively user hostile instead of just poorly designed.

One of my favourite ongoing jokes is Word, the program that exists for typing, 'randomly' deletes what you type:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/word/word-online-web-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-t...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-d...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/text-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/when-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/why-i...

I have no idea how many engineers work on Office Online, but other than security bugs I cannot think of a more important issue to resolve.

For a lightweight MS Teams experience, try: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli (terminal client), https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard (both Slack & Teams) or https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams (plugin for Pidgin).

While it is neat that people work on them, realistically these are not replacements for people wishing to have a lighter teams experience.

- Non of them are close to feature complete. As soon as you have to do more than chat (share files, do meetings, etc) they will let you down.

- In most corporate environments there is some extra layer of authentication involved I highly doubt these clients are able to handle.

The best way I have found to have a lighter teams experience is to simply use the web version as a PWA. This basically offers you all the features without the extended footprint of effectively running a second browser.

A little reminder from the past eh? I had to sigh when I read that. I guess purple somewhat died when the companies started banning accounts left and right for using third party clients for using their services. In a few cases it also seems like those bans started happening, because companies wanted to shut down third party clients to make sure people can't bypass ads, but also unfortunately to keep them from harvesting data.

I kinda have to ask, what features can you enforce in rate limiting in a first party client that you can't enforce in a third party client?

> I'm curious how Slack performs

My colleagues and myself used Slack for years, were forced to use Teams for about 2 years because of our new parent company, and finally went back to Slack after we collectively quit that shitshow to start a new company.

While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.

> While Slack isn't perfect either, it's miles better.

We switched from HipChat to Google Chat, which in my mind is pretty bad. Customers are often on Teams, which somehow manages to be MUCH MUCH worse. People kept telling me that Slack is much better than either Google Chat or MS Team, but after using it I can't say that I'd agree. Teams is clearly the worst, Slack is awful in its own way and Google Chat manages to be the best of the three, but mostly because the two others are so terrible.

It's clearly not an easy problem to solve, but I do wonder why all of these "enterprise" messaging/meeting/chat platforms are so terrible.

Twist is better still than Slack - they force everything into threads, so it becomes a reasonably browsable experience, and therefore possible to maintain async comms with. Slack still wins on integrations, though Twist has a few (including Zapier).

How do you find the thread with the conversation you need to carry on? That's the problem with Slack. Slack threads is where information goes to hide and die. "Ah, you did answer that two days ago? Where?"

There are two levels of organization - channels and threads, so it's not too bad to browse if reasonably setup. It also gives you an inbox with all of your unread threads, so that you can catch up quickly; and, you can mark a thread unread if you want to punt on it after reading.

> I'm still quite amazed that Microsoft decided this was acceptable

Their customers find it acceptable so it's OK for MS too.

If customers wouldn't find it acceptable they would use something else and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Maybe it helps that it comes with the Office suite and they already paid for it.

By the way, when a customer asks me how I want to do a video chat, almost always with screen sharing, I suggest Meet. If they mandate Teams, OK, I'll do Teams in a browser. Actually the best screen sharing seems to be Skype. It can zoom too. None of them can go full screen with no useless UI around the shared screen, tough luck. None of my customers are using Zoom anymore.

I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of the team(s) that develop Teams would reveal a lot. I doubt we can blame the tools they use.

I think a look at the organizational and project management structure of organizations that elect to use Teams would reveal a lot, also.

Yup. It's slow buggy. Tends to go into infinite loops. Sad really that it slows corporates so much.

It’s sad. I have clear memories of browsing the web quite capably with windows 98 and 64MB of RAM (or less!) and now we can’t even do it with gigabytes.

To be fair, that was also a much lighter web. Even if you remove all the heavy javascript overload modern webpages will be heavier simply due to higher resolution images and other media.

It also highly depends on what you want to browse. HN for example will work just fine without much memory. Expecting YouTube to be as light as 90s websites is asking a bit much.

Having said that, I do agree that we have overshot, and many websites are way too heavy for their use case.

Sticking with YouTube as an example, assuming for a moment that whatever device you are using does have hardware decoding, so video playback isn't dragging down performance. It still is an extremely heavy website due to all the tracking shenanigans, interactive elements and the fact that it is an SPA based design. Alternative front-ends like invidious show it is possible and in the past Google did actually provide light versions of many of their web apps specifically for this sort of use case. Sadly that is no longer the case.

On my Windows 7 throwback computer running an i5 3570K (a damn near top-of-the-line CPU 10 years ago) with iGPU, in Waterfox YouTube stutters when fullscreen in 1080p (even with enhanced-h264ify and hardware video decoding as far as I can tell), both in YouTube and Firefox's pop-out player. Videos play smoothly in Invidious. Enhancer for YouTube™ has a popout/embed button I could test, but it was pulled from addons.mozilla.org due to being broken by YouTube changes (it still works for me on my main computer?).

My laptop is an i7 4xxx so it's one year newer than yours and intrinsically better specced, i7 vs i5. I have no problems with videos. It could be the NVIDIA card in my laptop or the OS. I'm on Debian 11 now, which is much newer than Windows 7. Drivers, codecs, etc are more recent and possibly more performant.

To be honest, that could be just be some interaction with Waterfox specifically. It's not the first time I have encountered people having various issues with that firefox fork that other browsers don't encounter.

My test video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEuHOFgjrAo watched at 1080p60 in full screen. It's a reasonably good test of 60fps smoothness, though synthetic scrolling tests like TestUFO screen recordings might be better strictly speaking.

- Tried creating a new blank Waterfox profile with no changes except uBlock0. It drops frames, and the borders of the video (4:3 pillarboxes on a 16:9 screen) have a blue or green tint after I seek.

- Same result in a new blank Firefox ESR 115.6.0 (last Windows 7 release) profile with uBlock0.

- The YouTube embed player at https://www.youtube.com/embed/lEuHOFgjrAo, on my main Waterfox profile, runs as smoothly as Invidious (no stutters unless I'm interacting with the player UI).

On my Linux laptop with i3-3xxxm (a low-end? CPU even 10+ years ago) with iGPU, in Firefox YouTube plays fine in fullscreen in 1080p even without forcing h264. Enhancer removal is indeed a loss. Can try ImprovedTube.

You can still browse the web using Opera 12.18, which takes a little memory, but the HTML5 support will be poor. The web has evolved since then.

Opera 12 source code leaked, so you could even port it to new platforms. Sadly multiple exploits, html5, and finally licensing make it a dead end :(.

Opera really should have open source Presto when they switched to Blink.

Licensing is the only real problem, but that never stopped people from doing things either.

For some reason Linux users never got an update to 12.18 or 12.17. Latest one was 12.16.

Check out more lightweight web browsers: NetSurf, Pale Moon, K-Meleon on Goanna, Otter Browser, Ultralight, as well as terminal apps: Carbonyl, Browsh, Links (it has a graphical mode too).

When you run a chromium in headless mode it doesn't make the browser any lighter. I think what the OP means is that you need to have a browser with the most important JS and CSS functionality to render modern websites, but without all the junk on top of it.

qutebrowser and nyxt would fit the bill better. to be honest I feel like nyxt is really cool, but I'm not sure if choosing a lisp was the right idea.

You can install Carbonyl in a VPS and use my Carbonyl Terminal (https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal) as a thin client for it.

qutebrowser binary is 424MB (on macOS, at least). Is that considered light?

Well my (un-googled) Chromium installation takes up 254MB, and I use that as my "big/corporate" browser so I would definitely not consider that light.

qutebrowser uses a qt-webengine library in the background, which is also basically a full chromium rendering engine, where not all features are exposed to the UI. It's only light in terms of UI. Just like a headless Chromium is only light on the UI side of things.

There even was elinks that used svgalib instead of X.

So one could use it on a machine that did not even have any desktop enviroment installed.

This was Links, not Elinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_%28web_browser%29

I tried using palemoon a few years ago, but many web pages just didn't work at all. I wonder if that's changed?

Check out yourself, the latest release was 2 weeks ago: https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

This is gross exageration. A fairly decent low end desktop/laptop CPU with 4GB of RAM is enough to run MS Teams, and I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.

> I don't really understand why one would on purpose use a webmail when there are more practical and efficient MTAs.

Search on webmail is instantaneous. It was not on MTAs last time I tried. I remember someone always struggling to find old mails with his MTA while gmail would find it quite quickly.

Mutt with cached email it's uber fast. Also, your mail inbox it's yours, forever.

Search is instantaneous on my gnome evolution MTA.

Something must be really wrong when you need a 4GB machine to basically run Kopete/Pidgin+inline plugins at HD resolutions.

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