Opera with antiX sensational!

[Member banned]

Hi

Because I know that surfing with little RAM is a problem, I would like to tell you about my new experience with Opera:

I have 1GB of RAM and was looking for the right browser. Firefox wasn’t that bad, but from 2 fb tabs, a google translate and another page it reaches the limit where the swapfile starts to work. I see this well on the “Conky”, a wonderful tool 🙂 With Chromium and Chrome, it is a little worse than with firefox. Brave was about the same as firefox, but the built-in addblocker didn’t convince me at all!

Just out of curiosity and more of a coincidence, I tested Opera and there was a big surprise! Opera runs significantly faster than the up-to-date browsers mentioned above. Opera also has an addblocker built in and it works fine. In addition, Opera has many setting options that I have not found in the other browsers. Obviously Opera manages the memory better than the others! I observe that my RAM usage is never higher than 700MB (out of a total of 927MB available). If I am already close to 700MB and open another tab, the load even sinks and then slowly increases again to around 700MB, but never goes above it. I conclude from this that Opera has a limit on RAM usage and then uses the browser cache. Because the swapfile is NOT beeing activated, should mean it doesn’t swap! Sentational, really 🙂

I had also tested Falkon on my old notebook, also with 1GB Ram. It also ran better than Chromium and Firefox. The version that I installed under Lubuntu still had a static browser cache (not a dynamic one), which has the advantage that it can be increased manually. The maximum was 2GB.

But I recommend installing Opera to anyone who has not tried it yet. You can find it in “Package Installer”. At most, the list needs to be updated beforehand via the terminal. See separate post here:

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/can-i-install-opera-browser/

[Member andyprough]

Helpful

Up

0

::

That’s good news, I did not know that it had such good memory management. Memory is a big problem with most of the major modern browsers. I’ve always enjoyed my time with Opera when I’ve used it the last few years, the developers clearly put a lot of thought into making it a valuable tool. The mobile version also has a lot of great features. I’m not using it now because I’m trying to stick to libre licensed software, but if its memory management is that good then it definitely will find a place on older hardware.

[Member PPC]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I was an Opera user for many years, long time ago, on my windows and then Mint days. Until recently, I was a heavy Opera Mini user on my android device- but privacy concerns made me stray away from Opera.

If you don’t worry about your privacy, using closed source browser like Opera, then you have nothing to worry about…
But there are some more privacy friendly browsers that have low RAM footprint- like Ungoogle Chromium (for 64 bits only), and our very customized badwolf (check the recent forum thread on it- it may take a while to get used to, but it’s really low on RAM usage). There are more options available from the Package Installer, too…
For now, badwolf runs great on my single core netbook with 1 gig of RAM, and Firefox-esr is my back-up browser

P.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by Brian Masinick. Reason: Typo

[Member seaken64]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Thanks for the report on Opera. I used Opera a while back but have not tried it in a few years. I recently came across “Otter” which is a new browser that tries to recreate the old Opera before it changed direction. It uses a Chromium core and the QT WebEngine. I am running it now on antiX-16. I have been looking for something to use as my default browser in this old machine that is very low on RAM.

I am very impressed with it’s memory footprint so far. I have three tabs open and one is the antiX forum, which is really hard to browse in low memory and an old single-core processor for some reason (probably having to do with WordPress and/or JavaScript), and the RAM used is 137M. This is better than Midori or Qupzilla (Falkon) or Epiphany (Gnome Web). You should check it out. It is in the MX-19 repos. If you need help with installing from an MX repo just ask and we’ll help you out.

Seaken64

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by seaken64.

[Member andyprough]

Helpful

Up

0

::

seaken64 wrote:

I recently came across “Otter” which is a new browser that tries to recreate the old Opera before it changed direction. It uses a Chromium core and the QT WebEngine. I am running it now on antiX-16. I have been looking for something to use as my default browser in this old machine that is very low on RAM.

I am very impressed with it’s memory footprint so far. I have three tabs open and one is the antiX forum, which is really hard to browse in low memory and an old single-core processor for some reason (probably having to do with WordPress and/or JavaScript), and the RAM used is 137M.

That’s impressive, I had not touched Otter for several years, I should look at it again. That level of memory usage would be lower than the suckless Surf browser, based on my testing.

[Member roland]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I have never tried Opera, but like you discovered with Chromium and Firefox that with only 1gb ram they soon stall when too many instances or tabs are open, the practical limit being 3 or 4 on an MSI commercial desktop PC. But when I added another 1gb things improved remarkably and several more open tabs became possible. Changing the 64bit 1-core cpu for a similar 2-core version made another very worthwhile improvement.

[Member banned]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Yes, Opera’s license is not “perfect”, ok. I will soon test Vivalid and the others you suggested 🙂

[Member PPC]

Helpful

Up

0

::

@JSM: sorry to hijack your post a bit- but you mentioned you’ll test alternative browsers…
I tried out Otter browser – you have to install it’s dependencies (libqt5multimedia5 libqt5xmlpatterns5) and then you can test, if you are running a 64 bits pc, Otter’s appimage, available over at https://sourceforge.net/projects/otter-browser/files/otter-browser-weekly380/
If you running a 32 bits machine, you can try your luck compiling from source or installing .deb files already packaged for other systems (like, just for example https://launchpad.net/~otter-browser/+archive/ubuntu/release/+files/otter-browser_1.0.01-1~disco~ppa1_i386.deb – PLEASE BE CAREFUL– this .deb file is packaged for Ubuntu, not antiX so, if you break your computer, you get to keep the pieces)

On my single core desktop, installed from a dubious .deb file Otter runs quite fast. the .appimage version does not open any webpage, complains about SSL support…

By usual test is trying to open the same youtube video with a browser and see how it performs one my single core desktop and netbook. Otter’s first few seconds of video streaming are a bit slow, then it evens out, playing at 360p. Badwolf, with JavaScript enabled, plays the same video, out of the box, at 480p, and much smoothly… On the negative side, since Badwolf only runs in “private mode”, I always have to click the youtube’s pop window to stream video there… On both browsers the CPU runs at 100%, while streaming a YT video.

P.

[Member andyprough]

Helpful

Up

0

::

@PPC – I was playing around with Badwolf again last night. I downloaded an adblock easylist .json file for it and I thought it performed very well. Memory usage is extremely low. It has a lot of potential, especially for low-spec machines.

[Member banned]

Helpful

Up

0

::

I tested Vivaldi. He’s actually very deep with memory, like Opera. But he manages the tabs less well. If you have 3-4 “heavy” tabs open and switch from one to another, Vivaldi needs significantly more time than Opera. I have not tested Badwolf and Otter. I’m not very experienced with compilers and things like that 😉

Opera uses a different license. What does it mean? Does it say Opera is free (freeware) but not opensource? If Opera is free, why hide the code? There is no financial interest. It would be very interesting to know what algorithms Opera uses. A browser has to decide correctly what it wants in RAM and what it wants in cache. He has to decide correctly when to start caching and caching back again. And of course the programmers also have to be pretty well informed about user behavior. How many tabs does a user open, how often does he switch from one tab to another, etc. A browser could actually “learn” from its user and then adapt the algorithms to the specific user behavior, automatically 🙂

[Member seaken64]

Helpful

Up

0

::

For Otter you do not need to compile or use a Ubuntu repo. The .deb in the MX repo works with antiX.

Seaken64

[Member banned]

Helpful

Up

0

::

@seaken64

Ok, but for the moment I will let it with Opera. I am not more the youngest and sometime I need a break :-). I am happy, that I can still find the way to work with modern things…with some help from people in forums 🙂

Next project is to install Tiny Core on sda2, with a good browser, change the keyboard and try to find the right screen setting…this can take a week 😉

[Member oops]

Helpful

Up

0

::

@Seaken64 “For Otter you do not need to compile or use a Ubuntu repo. The .deb in the MX repo works with antiX.”

Tried Otter by this way, and Otter v1.0.01 is interesting … I have to do more test into my small eepc.

[Author]

Posts