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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

I do use Firefox, through inertia, but honestly it's not a good browser. It consumes 50%+ CPU constantly. It uses huge amounts of RAM. It crashes from time to time. Every few months I end up losing all my open tabs permanently. There's no isolation (process per tab). And they keep making gratuitous changes to the UI that don't improve the real UI problems but do require searching through about:config to revert them.

I would love there to be a minimal but usable browser.

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That's something I miss from running Linux: there were far more minimal browser options.

- Midori http://midori-browser.org/

- GNOME Web https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web

- rekonq http://rekonq.kde.org/

For I use Linux, i find these browsers cool but you wont uninstall chrome and firefox. Only chrome and firefox work for ALL sites properly...

Yup, my post was a bit incomplete: I loved to play with those browsers, but they always left me feeling frustrated. I was hoping that times had changed, but your response seems to say that hasn't happened yet.

I know it's horribly outdated and probably not for you, but if you have a really, really low-end system, K-Meleon is the best option that I could find, at least for Windows. It's not great but works fairly reasonable for how lightweight it is. This is what enabled me to surf the web on a Pentium 2 machine in 2010 where any other browser had issues even getting started.

I do see what you mean with a minimal browser though. It is what Chrome was initially: the basics that you needed and no clutter. I would like to see such a project based on Firefox, especially given how customizable Firefox already is it might be a pretty awesome project.

I agree for the no isolation part but in term of CPU and RAM I find that chrome tends to be worse than firefox actually.

The reason I switched back to Firefox from Chrome is the Self Destructing Cookie Extension which is just great.

That CPU and RAM consumption is likely due to extensions (AdBlock Plus being the most common hog). Unless you're running a really old version, Firefox is usually smaller than Chrome these days.

Actually almost forgot about this, but I tried watching a video on FF recently, and Chrome used about 5 percent of my CPU (with about 10 other tabs open), and a lot of extensions, too, while on Firefox I had just a few add-ons (some of the same as on Chrome), and only that video running. It used 15 percent of my CPU.

Yup ABP is killer. I'm also unwilling to upgrade to Australis at the moment, as I can't find a Mac-compatible theme that isn't painful to use with it. (Hate, hate, hate monochrome themes -- color coding the buttons may not be trendy but it improves usability, and has for the 20 years I've been using web browsers.) And Firebug has some major performance improvements with FF31 and newer.

And I wouldn't have as much a problem with a browser eating into my CPU/RAM is if it actually performed, but alas...

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