I suggest Nyxt browser, very lightweight and extensible
Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
41–50 of 92 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#42You can very easily and inexpensively upgrade this laptop to 16GB of RAM. I highly recommend you do this, it makes a world of difference. If you don't already have an SSD in this device I recommend you swap that out also. I would like to echo the recommendation for Firefox + uBlock Origin - you will see big improvements in perceived performance. (typing this on my 2011 MacBook Pro in FF)
I agree, though OP is a little ambiguous if this is a 2012 Unibody (which has USB3 and one of the best old machines) or a 2012 Retina which he would be out of luck.
I've upgraded multiple 2011/2012 Unibody MBP for friends and family with 16gb ram and a 512gb ssd for about $150 in the past few years, it makes the machine feel completely new and "snappy".
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#43I use Firefox but it's a memory hog too. To be fair, websites are the memory hogs imo. Sadly I don't think you can have the full web experience without sacrificing a couple gigs of ram if you have several tabs open at once. I know it's not open source but on a Macbook I would expect Safari to be the lightest browser. If you really want open and still like Chrome, you could try ungoogled chromium here : https://chromi…
For Firefox I am using an extension called auto tab discard (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...). It will suspend tabs from memory that have not been opened for a given time but you can easily open them again by pressing the tab. You can also whitelist some domains to prevent them from being suspended.
Give it a try. There is also the great suspender for Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#44My dream is that someone will spec out a nice simple subset of modern HTML/CSS, and folks will start making compatible static sites. A few years of that and we could have some nice truly lightweight browsers again. Imagine how fast sites like Wikipedia or YouTube could be if JS wasn't even an option.
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.
The Gemini protocol? It's a cool project but I think for anything to get big it would have to remain compatible with current browsers. The idea is a crowd-sourced embrace-extend-extinguish, except the opposite of extend.
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#45I use safari on a similar Mac with no problems.
Also this probably isn’t what you want to hear but I also got a headless desktop recently for all my dev related work... that made my Mac a lot faster!!
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#46I can recommend the great suspender extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... after a few minutes inactive tabs gets killed - works for me very well - you can also exclude sites.
I can't recommend this enough. Here is an option for Firefox users: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#47My dream is that someone will spec out a nice simple subset of modern HTML/CSS, and folks will start making compatible static sites. A few years of that and we could have some nice truly lightweight browsers again. Imagine how fast sites like Wikipedia or YouTube could be if JS wasn't even an option.
The problem is that nobody is going to migrate unless a major web player swings a big and likely anticompetitive stick.
You don't need to migrate. Keep it compatible with current browsers. Users will reap the benefits of the lightweight sites regardless of what browser they use. It would sort of be like AMP that way. But over time if you get enough major sites with compatible versions it would become useful to have a browser that only speaks the lightweight web, and that's when things could start to snowball. At no point do you need big companies or browser vendors to do anything other than not break current HTML/CSS compatibility.
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Gemini protocol? It's a cool project but I think for anything to get big it would have to remain compatible with current browsers. The idea is a crowd-sourced embrace-extend-extinguish, except the opposite of extend.
Yeah that is what I was thinking of, thanks for the assist. Agree that it won’t get big for the same reason.
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that nobody is going to migrate unless a major web player swings a big and likely anticompetitive stick.
You don't need to migrate. Keep it compatible with current browsers. Users will reap the benefits of the lightweight sites regardless of what browser they use. It would sort of be like AMP that way. But over time if you get enough major sites with compatible versions it would become useful to have a browser that only speaks the lightweight web, and that's when things could start to snowball. At no point do you need b…
> It would sort of be like AMP that way.
You may have noticed that this was pretty much exactly what I was talking about ;) Usability issues aside, nobody fixed their stuff until Google threatened their SEO.
Re: Ask HN: Can someone suggest an open source lightweight alternative to Chrome?
#50My dream is that someone will spec out a nice simple subset of modern HTML/CSS, and folks will start making compatible static sites. A few years of that and we could have some nice truly lightweight browsers again. Imagine how fast sites like Wikipedia or YouTube could be if JS wasn't even an option.
The most frustrating thing about web standards is that if we were going to do the whole apps-over-HTTP/HTML thing we could have features and light weight, by building way more functionality directly into HTML. Better form elements with more built-in features, better tables more like what's available in native UI kits, maybe even direct built-in support for major, complex UIs to support ecommerce and banking workflows and such, bring back frames but make them less-shit (seriously, how much of "AJAX" use is, in practice, basically just slightly-less-shit frames?), that kind of thing.
... and then cripple JavaScript so everyone has to use the built-in features and can't get "cute" at the user's expense.
But no, instead we're burning enormous quantities of person-hours doing the same damn thing over and over with bad tools and creatively-broken a11y support and shitty custom animations no-one wants, and wasting huge amounts of energy and users' time.