Recommend lightweight web browser

Support & Help Requests
1

I am looking for a lighter weight web browser other than firefox and/or chrome. Something that can stay open all day with out allot of cpu/ram consumption. I tried looking at reviews for various browsers but nothing tells me with how well they work with ubuntu-mate 15.10. I was thinking about Midori but wasnt sure on how well it intergreated with the ubuntu-mate.
Any recommendations and/or comments would be appreciated. Also, if there is a way to slim down firefox or chrome that might work. I just donā€™t need video streaming or things like that.

thanks

2

Of the ones I know, midori is probably your best bet. Trying for a day it is probably the best test of how well it integrates with MATE

3

thank you so much for your reply. I will give it a try. :grinning:

Edit: well after playing around with Midori for a couple hours, i feel it just crashes too much. Not very ubuntu-mate friendly. At least not on my system. The search continuesā€¦

4

Firefox. The browser market isnt a place where a niche product can survive.

2 Likes
5

I agree, decided to just stick with firefox till something else comes along. Just wish that they wouldnā€™t keep adding things into the web browsers and making them so ā€œfull featuredā€. Sometimes someone just need a browser not a browser/chat/video/email/etc. program.

6

What about something built on (or stripped out of) Mozilla?

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

1 Like
7

I didnt know SeaMonkey was still around, been awhile sense i have looked at that. The Firefox Light looks interesting too. Ill have to check these out. Thank you!

8

I had the same issue as you recently. Tried Midori, but it was not Robust enough and was crashing on me. Firefox is a little too heavy for my liking, but I ended up settling on Pale Moon. Itā€™s a fork of Firefox, but with an emphasis on being lightweight and it has the best Start Menu that Iā€™ve seem. Itā€™s definitely worth a view at least.

Also an extremely lightweight browser would be Dillo if no other options work for you.

9

+1 for PaleMoon ā€¦

10

Opera browser?:

2 Likes
11

That's a shame. I confess I had only tried it about 2-3 years ago, and it used to crash quite a bit then. I sort of hoped that over time and with the attention it's received from the Elementary project that it would be in a better state!

12

That looks interesting, going to give us a review :smiley:

13

Iā€™ve been extremely impressed with Opera. If light weight, but functional, are youā€™re requirements give Opera a try. Itā€™s why Iā€™ve included it in the Software Boutique for 16.04 :slight_smile:

14

You should try ubuntu touch web browser. Itā€™s available on the desktop too. The package is called webbrowser-app and you can get it from default repo. Itā€™s pretty light weight from what I can tell.

15

Not a lot to review - it is Firefox with all the old processor legacy code pulled out, none of the newest Firefox bloat included, and the ā€˜oldā€™ Firefox interface. So itā€™s faster and lighter.

But thereā€™s a (small) price: manual install via a gui script; some extensions no longer work, so need some PM-specific ones in their place, and occasional glitches on sites which code for the various anomalies in Firefox version-on-version which PM doesnā€™t have.

http://www.palemoon.org/ Linux version: http://linux.palemoon.org/

16

Seamonkey has, historically, been just that: but after their 2.40 release (yesterday), in tandem with Firefoxes new 45.0.1, things have apparently reversed.

I have been a die-hard Seamonkey devotee - for years - so this is a shock!

Give Firefox another look! :joy:

17

Iā€™ve been using Pale Moon for two years now, since Mozilla introduced their Australis interface.
It was the last straw, after all what theyā€™ve done to the once fantastic browser.

First of all, PM doesnā€™t spy on you, all that code has been removed.

To me, the most important AddOnā€™s do work without any problems: Clean Links 2.7, NoScript 2.9.0.5, uBlockOrigin 1.6.4.
Canā€™t tell you anything about Java and Flash, because I donā€™t use them within PM.

If one experiences problems with a website because itā€™s sniffing at the user.agent string, PM provides a pretty nice way to pretend itā€™s another browser. Just add an entry to ā€œabout:configā€ and youā€™re done:

user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0"); user_pref("general.useragent.override.addons.mozilla.org", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0");

That means that PM looks like the current ESR version of Firefox to all websites, except for Mozilla AddOnā€™s site. You can continue/enhance that, btw.

Fresh out of the box Pale Moon may look pretty old fashioned, but itā€™s just its clothes. I personally use the Maxi4-Theme from their site (unfortunately canā€™t paste a screenshot yet).

Iā€™m still on PM 25.8.1, the latest version is 26.2. Itā€™s got a new engine - Goanna - and of course there are some hiccups. The team is working hard on getting over these ā€œchildren diseasesā€ and Iā€™ll upgrade to it next month when I give UM a try :wink:

If you need further info on Pale Moon, just let me know and Iā€™ll do my best to answer your questions.

@Wimpy: PM has definitely deserved to get included into one of the top distros :wink:

18

Nice review, makes PM sound very tempting. Nice to find out these things without having to load and run, thanks.

I do run FF ESR, just fits the LTS profile I think :slight_smile:

19

Does Palemoon have an apt repository?

20

Unfortunately not. At least no official repoā€™s.
There are repoā€™s available for Manjaro, PC Linux OS and Puppy Linux, but these are developed and maintained by the respective distro.

Maybe youā€™d like to talk to Trava90, heā€™s the Linux guy within their support and development team. Heā€™s a nice guy you can talk to.
For whatever it may be good, hereā€™s the link to their forum site: Pale Moon for Linux Forum

I would love to give you a helping hand on building a repo, but Iā€™m a bloody Linux beginner (still on Linux Mint since three months; Iā€™m going to drop it for several serious reasons next month).

For those of you who are interested in giving PM a try: Even without a repo the installation is pretty straightforward, no big deal. But itā€™s still no repo. :cry: