Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?

Gemini ;)

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

I'm only half way joking.

I tried a few lightweight Linux browsers on a 2GB low-clocked Celeron machine a while back ("hacked", older-model Asus Chromebox). Chief candidates were Surf, Qutebrowser, and Midori.

The best on the performance/ui-jank scale was Surf, by a long shot. In fact it was best on both counts. I can't remember which was which but one of the three was noticeably much heavier than the other two, taking a long time to load and sometimes having slow paints, and the other had a lot of weird UI issues that might have been ironed out by running under an all-the-bells-and-whistles DE (KDE or Gnome) which tend to helpfully fix all the UI problems they introduce, but if you're really resource-constrained there's no way you can afford to run either of those (especially Gnome).

Surf's very shortcut-focused in its UI so there's a bit of memorization needed, and you may want to compile it with a few patches for convenience, but its performance and rendering were, in the field of low-resource browsers, outstanding.

[reads post more carefully] Oh you're on Mac and have 8GB of memory? Just use Safari, it makes way, way better use of resources than Chrome or Firefox. Seriously, it's way better, at the cost of having worse extensions, but you're gonna give those up on any other low-resource option anyway. Also stop using the webapp versions of crapware like Gmail if you're going to leave it open all the time—use native mail clients or the "basic HTML" version. Keep your "webapps" in their own windows and close them when not in use, they all eat shitloads of memory for no good reason, no matter the browser.

I saw something like what you wish for mentioned here once or twice but the name escapes me. Documents consisted of just text and styles, but the project made the strange choice not to use HTTP for transport.

Big tech players have been happy to create 'lite' versions of their apps for the developing world market, so this doesn't seem completely far fetched to me

I’m also using Firefox, but instead of ublock origin I’m using an extension called “Disable JavaScript” combined with the out of the box tracking protection (in strict mode). On my laptop with 4G of RAM, this works fairly well.

For the vast majority of news websites, running without js is a huge improvement to both performance and user experience. It even gets around a lot of paywalls.

I don’t think the sites that run slowly would be helped by a “lightweight” browser, since it’s not the browser itself that’s slowing things down, but the website. The only way to fix this is to remove those features from the website, whether that’s by disabling them, or using a browser that doesn’t support those features (eg a text-only browser).