Light Weight Fast Browser

Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

freenewer wrote:
Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

You can probably google for some lightweight browsers, but if FF is stealing
half of your CPU, I'd suggest there is something amiss with your setup. You
might want to check what's going on in Windows Task Manager. You could also
try uninstalling and reinstalling FF, for starters, if you don't want to
debug it.

freenewer wrote:
Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

Buy a faster CPU (by faster, not in clock rate,
but in number of cores).

As Ripley would say "it's the only way to be sure".

One of the reasons Firefox will steal CPU, is
it uses "compositing at 60FPS". That means it is
re-drawing the screen at 60FPS, even when the
web page content is not changing!

In the old days, only an "expose" event would cause
a screen redraw. Back in those days, we could be
assured that a "quiet" desktop, didn't need to waste
CPU.

But the idea that compositing could "solve all the
problems we've been having, figuring out what
parts of the screen to update", that means a heavy
price has to be paid somewhere.

Now, on a really really modern computer, you have
a nice video card with plenty of resources for
compositing. The CPU load then can be quite low, because
the video card is railed instead. (It's got lots of
shaders and other do-dads, so it doesn't care.)
But now, imagine that your video card is a stinker,
like my collection of video cards here. Then the
software may fall back on CPU rendering to keep
the compositing approach working.

Basically, this is a "SmartPhone" philosophy to software
design. Everyone knows that SmartPhones have nice GPUs,
so they bloat up the load on the GPU because it's a
great "free" resource. The developers don't care that
our "ancient" (five year old) computers don't work
quite as well, and then bog down as a result.

You could use Lynx browser, which doesn't have any graphics
but is just text. And I can guarantee you, that
at least a few times during the day, the CPU
will stop bogging :-)

If I thought "about:config" had settings to tame these
behaviors, I'd have already looked these up for you.
However, I don't think the compositing approach can be
removed. You'd need to go back and use an older version
of Firefox for that. And then you might lose some degree
of crypto support, proper https support for certificates
with this or that algo - they make sure that if you
try to go backwards, your web experience will be... miserable.
Maybe some flavor of HTML5 video support would go missing.
Or the module to make Netflix work would be gone.

And I think you already knew that.

Web page designers test against mainstream browsers.
Those bloated browsers. If you found a sufficiently
obscure browser, your web surfing experience would be
like using a copy of Apple Safari (which would only
render about 30% of the sites I'd visit, properly).
To escape bloat, you need a mainstream browser provider
to agree to clean up their act - which of course,
isn't going to happen.

Paul

In message , Bill in Co
writes
freenewer wrote:
Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

You can probably google for some lightweight browsers, but if FF is stealing
half of your CPU, I'd suggest there is something amiss with your setup. You
might want to check what's going on in Windows Task Manager. You could also
try uninstalling and reinstalling FF, for starters, if you don't want to
debug it.

Firefox (V52.8.0 ESR) is very slow to start from cold, and has become
almost unusable for some websites. It can grind to a complete halt. You
know it's struggling when the normally silent CPU fan starts to sound
like a hovercraft at full speed.

Re-installing doesn't seem to help.

I've also got Chrome installed, and that's a lot better - but,
strangely, won't connect to certain websites, such as
https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/
where I get
"This site cant be reached.
The web page at https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/ might be
temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address."
--
Ian

Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Bill in Co
writes
freenewer wrote:
Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

You can probably google for some lightweight browsers, but if FF is
stealing half of your CPU, I'd suggest there is something amiss with
your setup. You might want to check what's going on in Windows Task
Manager. You could also try uninstalling and reinstalling FF, for
starters, if you don't want to debug it.

Firefox (V52.8.0 ESR) is very slow to start from cold, and has become
almost unusable for some websites. It can grind to a complete halt. You
know it's struggling when the normally silent CPU fan starts to sound
like a hovercraft at full speed.

Re-installing doesn't seem to help.

I've also got Chrome installed, and that's a lot better - but,
strangely, won't connect to certain websites, such as
https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/
where I get
"This site cant be reached.
The web page at https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/ might be
temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address."
--
Ian

I'm using FF 52.6.0, which I had thought was the last version for XP, but
don't have any real problems with it. Possibly that's due to it being
52.6.0 - don't know.

Opera for XP seems to work well.
Comments please.

Others ?

freenewer wrote:
Suggestions please.

Need for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Pro

FireFox keeps stealing 50% of my CPU !!!

What about Vivaldi ? Others ?

Want to get away from Mozilla.

My FF 27.0 works quite well with XP.
No good reason to update.

Burningperson wrote:

Opera for XP seems to work well.
Comments please.

Others ?

So that's the version before Opera became based on Chrome.

Isn't that a bit old now ?

The web is going to "all https", so your browser
has to be ready for the certificate format of
the week for that.

What you need, is a fork that's still supported.

Paul