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Comment by 6510 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if that works beneficial on old computers that freeze up when you try load the GB js ad-auction circus news circus website. I want to browse loaded pages while the new tabs load. If the client just hangs for 2 min it gets boring fast.

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Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.

One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be installed by default in most Linux distributions but I think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia says its also available on OSX and Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org

Not supported on OS X for some time.

Chawan is nice

https://chawan.net/

Didn’t want to upgrade the memory?

It’s the speed of the JavaScript compiler, on those old browsers they were expected to handle a few kilobytes max of event listeners. The chrome vs Firefox browser wars sped up JavaScript compilation by 10x at least

Yes I was alive for that. Just said that because that Mac could take up to 1.5GB of RAM

If only there was browser-as-a-service. That would load the pages over it's fast connection and show them to you.

I feel like there already was one, on HN a few years ago. If I remember right, they were hoping to charge $20/month.

Edit: Ah, this was it: https://mightyapp.webflow.io/

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