A lightweight Internet browser?

[Akademika]

I just bought an Acer Aspire One, and it only comes with 512 MB RAM.

I'm very new to Linux, only tried it once before, for a few days. I'm looking for a very lightweight Internet browser to replace Firefox. I need a "normal" browser, don't really care which, but preferred one that supports all the stuff I would/could need like Flash etc. I also prefer tabs, as I usually have several pages open. Are there any good replacements for Firefox?

I'm thinking of upgrading the RAM, but 1GB ain't THAT much either, so I could still need a light browser.

[GNU-Fan]

Hmm, just wondering, what makes you unhappy with FF and which version do you use? I'm asking because I use version 2 with ~300MB and I can't complain.

Also I have to say that it will be very hard to find a lightweight browser "that supports all the stuff" because these two are somewhat mutually exclusive.

[Kieren]

Are you running system hungry applications? 512 RAM is more than enough to run FireFox.

I have 512 in my laptop and it runs Ubuntu (with CompizFusion) and lots of applications including FireFox 3 without any problems

[i92guboj]

You can run firefox as long as the rest of your programs are not too memory hungry.

If you want to try two somewhat lighter alternatives, try opera, and maybe konqueror. Though when you have 10 tabs open and flash on, none of this could be considered a lightweight browser.

[kai12]

Hi,

I agree that with 0.5GB or even 1GB Firefox should be ok,
but still: you asked for lightweight browsers, so...

I'm using on older version of Epiphany (2.14.3) and it seems a little more
lightweight than FF 2.0 to me, so you might want to check that out.
Newer versions of Epiphany will use WebKit instead of Gecko, and my
understanding is that WebKit is lighter than Gecko, but also FF 3 is
lighter than FF 2, so trying out the latest version might be interesting.

Most of the time, I'm running Opera, which is oftern praised for its small
memory footprint - I don't know if this is true though.

There is Galeon, from which Epiphany was forked, but I think development
has been stopped.

Put in your place, I'd just install and test different browsers starting with
Epiphany.

cheers, kai

EDIT: One more thing - it seems you want to speed up your laptop / free
some memory. I doubt a different browser will make a whole lot of a difference.
Have you considered using a lightweight window manager, i.e. neither KDE
nor GNOME, but XFCE or fluxbox/blackbox?

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

You could try dillo, as it's very lightweight, but I wouldn't exactly call it a normal browser. It's worth checking out so that you know about it, either way:

http://www.dillo.org/

[elija]

I believe Seakmonkey is lighter than Firefox espspecially as it has it's own mail client. Seamonkey was Mozilla.Org many moons ago, which is the browser that Firefox came from.

Dillo is probably the lightest of the graphical browsers though.

[oz]

I believe Seakmonkey is lighter than Firefox espspecially as it has it's own mail client. Seamonkey was Mozilla.Org many moons ago, which is the browser that Firefox came from.

I agree and think Firefox combined with Thunderbird is much bigger than the entire Seamonkey Suite. I could certainly adapt to and use Seamonkey if I had to, but still prefer Firefox, overall though.

[MetalheadGautham]

Welcome to the forums!

You could try dillo, as it's very lightweight, but I wouldn't exactly call it a normal browser. It's worth checking out so that you know about it, either way:

Dillo Web Browser :: Home Page

If he agrees to use Dillo, maybe even Links would impress him

[Dapper Dan]

The fastest light browser I've found is Links-graphics. Blisteringly fast and very easy on resources, but you won't get all the "extra stuff" with it though.