Anthony J. Bentley writes:
Mark Galassi writes:
The result was dreadful: you use firefox and it immediately uses all RAM. Even a 1gig machine cannot work with current versions.
Yes, browsers are possibly the most apt example of Wirth’s Law in action.
Webkit was quite a bit lighter weight than firefox, and with Python bindings you can write a minimal browser in a few pages of Python code. For example, on a Debian-derived system, install python-webkit and look at /usr/share/doc/python-webkit/examples/browser.py. Here's how they compare on https://nmglug.org (after a fresh startup, no other tabs or URLs loaded): PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND 17197 1.9 3.4 264596 66320 pts/2 Sl 19:05 0:02 python /usr/share/doc/python-webkit/examples/browser.py 17222 36.6 8.9 624612 172764 tty1 Sl 19:07 0:13 firefox The comparison will be a lot less favorable if you use a full-featured webkit based browser, like chromium or konqueror. In other words, a lot of the memory footprint is the browser bells and whistles, not the underlying layout engine. I'm forever being tempted to write and maintain my own custom browser that way ... and then I remember how much I've invested into customized Firefox settings, noscript and cookie and other privacy profiles, etc. and I discard the idea. But for a quickie browser on an old low-power system, it might work fine, and would support all modern websites ... possibly better than firefox/gecko does. ...Akkana