Except Windows is perfectly fine on Core Duo hardware. Chances are it'll run Windows better than old Mac OS.
IE is perfectly fine. Edge is even faster, but there's a lot of weird bugs I have with it.
This. I hope I can find a copy of 7 that has not been "activated" yet.[rant]Why can MS get away with activation?Probably to stop the abandonware scene.[/rant]
Also, isn't this tread getting quite off-topic? @Bry89 I recommend Opera 12.
I haven't used Firefox in ages but from what I've heard it's worse now than it used to be. Personally, I'm using Chrome but I've been trying Opera recently and I've been considering switching to it. In terms of RAM and CPU usage, I don't really know which one is better since my computer is pretty powerful and can handle mostly anything. I don't recommend IE at all, I absolutely despise it, but Edge is okay from what I've known.
IE 11 is actually not bad as IE goes... but it's a victim of poor timing. By the time it came out, the world (and more importantly, web developers) had pretty much forsaken IE. There's still some shitty LOB web apps that need it and a few people that can't be bothered to download another browser, but yeah, its marketshare is a fraction of what it used to be. Chrome pretty much dominates the browser space now.
IE 11 is actually not bad as IE goes... but it's a victim of poor timing. By the time it came out, the world (and more importantly, web developers) had pretty much forsaken IE. There's still some shitty LOB web apps that need it and a few people that can't be bothered to download another browser, but yeah, its marketshare is a fraction of what it used to be. Chrome pretty much dominates the browser space now.
And FF has had almost no share for years now. And Yahoo as default dug their grave even deeper.Here's a comparison of Firefox just before Chrome came out, and FF now.
August 2008: 76.24% IE 18.24% Firefox 2.73% Safari 2.17% Opera 0.48% Netscape
August 2017: 59.27% Chrome 17.63% IE 11.93% Firefox 5.63% Edge 3.57% Safari 1.21% Opera 0.36% "other" (presumably Netscape)
Like I said earlier, I recommend SeaMonkey if you want a suite and like Mozilla, or Opera 12, if you are like me and want a truly lightweight browser. Oh, and built in VPN, so Big Bill can't find you. :P
VPN for other than means to circumvent geolocation and access a LAN is pure snake oil. Your connection is obviously piped through somewhere else, (where things like DPI or analyzing both ends of the connection can be done) and you don't know if they log or do worse things. Again, snake oil. Tor, I2P, and other darknets solve the latter problem and some of the former.
I find built-in VPN in Opera useful if all you're using it for is geolocation circumvention or to hide your public IP. It's obviously not made for privacy, if that's what you need you're definitely going to use something more serious. It's actually one of the reasons why I'm considering switching to Opera, I'm not fond of installing 3rd-party extensions/software which could be just as bad in terms of privacy as Opera's.
Jesus people, a browser is the absolute worst application to stay on an older version of. That is the prime ingress for exploits.
We know (or should know) that IE6, etc. is insecure, however I do think most people here are intelligent enough to not click on suspicious links or ads (or visit the public web) when using an older browser. So as long as you are taking extra precautions, you may play around with an older browser (e.g. try to watch YouTube but don't click on any of the ads).
But then again, you have a valid point. Insecure browsers definitely are the primary ingress for attacks. Be careful out there.
Uh, just give Edge a try, if you already found out it might be what you're looking for. "Lol I can't use this because people still talk shit about it" is just stupid.
I'd recommend Opera, but it became Chrome a while ago. Maybe Vivaldi... oh wait, it's Chrome now as well. Fuck. Maybe upgrade your RAM or change your browsing habits?
Microsoft Edge still doesn't have many popular extensions and is a slow, memory hogging application that crashes without cause every 5-0 minutes. Unbearable.
I don't know, Edge isn't as stable as it should be, but I've been dailying it for over a year and it seems fine. uBlock Origin exists and that's all I wanted - if TPL support existed, I wouldn't even need that.
there is actually a version of safari for windows. It is a bit outdated and I don't think it is supported anymore, but in my observations it loads most webpages ok and is fairly light on resources.
Safari for Windows hasn't been updated in 5 years. Using it is probably not a wise idea. Safari for Mac is very light and efficient though, and if you're on the latest macOS then I don't see any reason to not use it, though it becomes outdated very fast: new features are only added in new OS releases and security updates don't last very long. Safari for 10.8 is outdated as hell for example.
Safari for Windows is version 5, which I think was outdated a entire *year* before it was discontinued. Maybe try SeaMonkey? It uses the gecko engine but with the Mozilla front-end and includes IRC. BTW, I would avoid Blink based browsers like the plague.
BTW, I would avoid Blink based browsers like the plague.
I know I'm going to regret asking this, but why? Also, I'm not aware of any other projects besides Chrome making use of it (and I can't be bothered to Google it at the moment).
BTW, I would avoid Blink based browsers like the plague.
I know I'm going to regret asking this, but why?
I love khtml(using it right now on kubuntu!) , but somehow Google managed to make it RAM consuming. I don't need sandboxing. And 2 GB of RAM isn't good enough for Chrome.
As an XP user, my main computer has 512 of RAM, and i would use IE (*cough*And i do not think it is evil, i like it very much, it just can't display some pages. It was a joke, and some people need to lighten up *Cough*), but newer sites HATE it. i use FireFox, and as i almost never have more than 1- tabs open, it works fine.
Now if all the browsers were regularly using 1 GB of RAM, that'd be a different story and I'd attribute it to the changing times. Web browsers have to do a lot more these days then they used to and most systems could easily handle that kind of memory usage. But when the competition is using 1/8th of the RAM to do the same thing... that's just sloppy.
It helps some to disable cache entirely. Look at the cache structure, consider all the resources (file handles etc.) it takes to keep track of 1500 empty directories, and wonder no more at the galloping waste. That's horrible coding zen, as Michael Abrash would say.
Plugin-container is another leaky steaming pile that can easily eat a gig of RAM admiring its navel, and doesn't like to give it back.
I long for the performance of Netscape 3, which was (measurably) 20 times faster at rendering the same HTML. Unfortunately that source is not available (JMZ tried and tried to get it released).
Disabling cache in most browsers would do nothing for ram usage.
For instance Firefox uses disk cache by default.
Setting Firefox to use memory ram cache obviously exponentially increases memory use though.
But hey, it's faster and doesn't waer down SSD. Until firefox(rapidly) reaches 2gb ram use and crashes.
The easiest way not to overuse RAM is to not have 50 tabs open. There's a task manager in Chrome and Opera, and probably in other browsers, that lets you see the RAM and CPU usage for each individual tab and window. In our age of over-designed, over-programmed websites there's a good chance that you might end up with a website that hogs up 150+ MB. No big deal on its own, but a serious problem when you have multiple tabs and windows open.
Comments
Also, isn't this tread getting quite off-topic?
@Bry89 I recommend Opera 12.
August 2008: 76.24% IE 18.24% Firefox 2.73% Safari 2.17% Opera 0.48% Netscape
August 2017: 59.27% Chrome 17.63% IE 11.93% Firefox 5.63% Edge 3.57% Safari 1.21% Opera 0.36% "other" (presumably Netscape)
Like I said earlier, I recommend SeaMonkey if you want a suite and like Mozilla, or Opera 12, if you are like me and want a truly lightweight browser. Oh, and built in VPN, so Big Bill can't find you. :P
We know (or should know) that IE6, etc. is insecure, however I do think most people here are intelligent enough to not click on suspicious links or ads (or visit the public web) when using an older browser. So as long as you are taking extra precautions, you may play around with an older browser (e.g. try to watch YouTube but don't click on any of the ads).
But then again, you have a valid point. Insecure browsers definitely are the primary ingress for attacks. Be careful out there.
Scripts....
I know I'm going to regret asking this, but why? Also, I'm not aware of any other projects besides Chrome making use of it (and I can't be bothered to Google it at the moment).
its not safe to use!
But IE 6 was completely unsafe to use the second it was released.
Correction: it was unsafe to use before it was released.
It helps some to disable cache entirely. Look at the cache structure, consider all the resources (file handles etc.) it takes to keep track of 1500 empty directories, and wonder no more at the galloping waste. That's horrible coding zen, as Michael Abrash would say.
Plugin-container is another leaky steaming pile that can easily eat a gig of RAM admiring its navel, and doesn't like to give it back.
I long for the performance of Netscape 3, which was (measurably) 20 times faster at rendering the same HTML. Unfortunately that source is not available (JMZ tried and tried to get it released).
For instance Firefox uses disk cache by default.
Setting Firefox to use memory ram cache obviously exponentially increases memory use though.
But hey, it's faster and doesn't waer down SSD. Until firefox(rapidly) reaches 2gb ram use and crashes.
For my retro compadres who like myself still stubbornly cling to WinXP, here's something interesting:
Weekly browser binaries for PaleMoon, Basilisk, Firefox, and K-Meleon, compiled for XP (he also does some builds for Win2K).
http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/
[RSS feed: http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default ]
I wonder if these might be more thrifty even running on a later Windows.
I'll have to test some of this stuff out. I wonder if it's any faster than Firefox 52ESR.