General discussion • Re: What product would you like to see?

I first learned to program on a machine with 8K of memory. I first programmed professionally on a mainframe where my programs were limited to 16MB of memory. It is absolutely shocking to me that a browser displaying a single simple web page might take more than 0.5GB. (Or, in fact 0.87GB, as shown at the link below.)

I don’t think it’s the web pages fault as much as the web browsers. I’ve been playing with a very simple kiosk system for years where I generate a very simple web page using a cgi program, and only refresh that page once a minute. Given the same page, different browsers used vastly different amounts of memory. The big name browsers - I mean you, Chromium and Firefox - use big memory. (They weren’t always so bad; in fact they’ve gotten continually worse in terms of their memory usage. I used to be able to use chromium, no way that would work now. Those numbers were from 2022. I should rerun my tests to see how much worse they’ve gotten…)

To run my kiosk system on pi’s with little memory, I had to look elsewhere, trying epiphany-browser (“web”), then midori, then netsurf-gtk. Dillo used the least memory of them all, but it couldn’t refresh every minute as I needed it to, so it was out of the running. I currently run on Pi Zero 2s using netsurf-gtk.

Statistics: Posted by tinker2much — Sat Feb 07, 2026 1:33 am

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