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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

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tambourine_man·

Something that aged poorly are browsers. Can you run contemporary Chromium, Firefox, WebKit decently on a 800mhz G4?

And I doubt it could handle more than a few open tabs with 512MB of RAM.

Most everything else I use computers for have been fast enough for 20 years or so.

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The proliferation of browser-based crap was a godsend for hardware manufacturers.

Even something like Debian with the Mate DE can be pretty lightweight. Modern web crap is really the biggest resource hog for most users.

Yeah, I was running Firefox on my iMac G4 with OpenBSD. It was being killed frequently though by hitting the memory limit (which at the time I didn't know how to raise). I'm intending to go back and try again with my deeper knowledge of the OS. I have MANY old machines which could benefit from having a latest-features OS to use.

The best current option is InterWebPPC. https://github.com/wicknix/InterWebPPC

Last time I used a computer with 1GB RAM was in 2014, with 32-bit Windows XP. The computer had 512MB in use after startup and could only handle 2-3 tabs in the Chrome of the time, everything (e.g. Gmail at the time) seemed to use about 100MB.

So 2014 Chrome with webapps like 2014 Gmail wasn't really practical on 1GB. So I very much doubt that 2023 Chrome with 2023 webapps would be practical on 512MB RAM.

Netsurf works well on low spec and render most pages well enough. Also, switching to lite or mobile versions of websites when they exist render them much lighter and more readable.

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