So, I recently decided to revive an old (2011) Macbook Pro, which had become unusably slow, by installing a light Linux distribution on it. And indeed, with AntiX (https://antixlinux.com/) it runs almost as fast as a new one for the basic tasks. Great job.
Remains the question: what web browser can be used on such an old device? So I decided to run a test… the candidates were:
Midori, Netsurf, Falkon, Vivaldi, and Chromium
of course there is also Firefox, but that’s a standard. It’s also quite heavy on RAM, so I wanted to try alternatives.
I tried practical functionality: Youtube, Amazon, webmail applications. For speed, I resorted to browserbench.org. Memory was measured for all processes run by the browser.
Results:
- Midori: user interface is a little buggy – all tested webpages rendered correctly – speedcheck: 1st place – 700MB RAM used
- Netsurf: none of the tested web pages rendered correctly, for daily life mostly unusable
- Falkon: good user interface – all tested webpages rendered correctly – speedcheck: 4th place – 800MB RAM
- Vivaldi: good user interface, reacts very fast – all tested webpages rendered correctly – speedcheck: 3rd place – 1200MB RAM used
- Chromium: good user interface – all tested webpages rendered correctly – speedcheck: 2nd place – 1300 MB RAM used.
Conclusion: I will generally go for Midori and keep Firefox and Chromium as a backup if some webpage doesn’t work correctly in Midori.
