Lean Linux web browsers

Web browsers like Firefox and Chrome gobble up working memory by the gigabyte. In PCs that have seen better days, there is often not enough space for the extra RAM required to accommodate browsers like these. Luckily, most Linux distributions have a lean web browser application in their package list.

The newer applications such as Qutebrowser [1] are built on the Webkit rendering engine. The same goes for Apple Safari and more recently, Opera. However, even the Webkit engine is not exactly frugal.

Thus, it makes sense to take a look at web browsers that have been in existence for a long time and are less outrageous in their resource demands. These browsers can generally be divided between those having a graphical interface under X and those that are text based. The latter of the two types of browsers run on the console, in a terminal emulator or remotely via SSH. There are exceptions here. Some text-based browsers use Framebuffer to also offer a graphical interface on the console. One such browser can actually handle all three methods.

In preparing this article, we looked at seven extra lean web browsers. All can be found in the repositories of Debian 8 Jessie and the current Debian derivatives like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. A Thinkpad 760XD from 1997 with 80MB RAM running Debian 8 served as the test platform.

NetSurf

NetSurf [2] is the largest among the small and is continuously being further developed. The newest version 3.3 appeared at the beginning of 2015. The Ubuntu package for version 3.2 has a GTK interface and takes approximately 4MB of space on the disk. When running, the browser can require 104MB just to open a web page. When there are lots of open tabs, this browser can cause serious slow-downs for computers that don't have much RAM. This is because the system is forced to swap out part of the browser.

Even so, NetSurf offers the most functionality. In addition to the best CSS support (CSS 2.1) of the bunch, plus the most visually appealing display of today's typical web pages, Netsurf is one of the few browsers to offer JavaScript support. However, this support option needs to be explicitly activated in the settings. An older Mozilla JavaScript library is used, which can sometimes lead to difficulty with web pages that make heavy use of JavaScript.

Gmail in this browser will complain about an unknown browser and only display an HTML version. Google Maps appears as a white page. NetSurf crashes when OpenStreetMap is invoked. NetSurf renders GitHub without a problem when JavaScript is disabled. With JavaScript enabled, the view takes forever to load a project page even on a computer that has a 2GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM.

Otherwise, Netsurf shines with its numerous settings, built in ad and pop-up blockers that need to be manually activated, and an indicator for the load time (Figure 1). Netsurf is the only lean browser that supports the well-known key combinations Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- for changing font size. These have been adopted from the major browsers.

Figure 1: Netsurf with multiple open tabs. Tabs can be arranged at the top, bottom, or on the sides.

In addition to the GTK version, NetSurf is also available as a Framebuffer version, netsurf-fb , for a graphical interface on the Linux console. It is, however, usually the case that you will need to explicitly load the Framebuffer kernel driver and adapt the access rights.

On the test computer, we used modprobe tridentfb to load the driver. If necessary, you can permanently activate the driver via making an entry in the /etc/modules file. During testing, however, NetSurf showed a black screen on the console and then it crashed.

Dillo

Dillo is a web browser for X that is also under active development. It is not based on GTK, but instead on the leaner Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK). As a result, many elements of the user interface (Figure 2) appear to be atypical. Currently, Version 3.0.5 is available. Developers are working on version 3.1.

Figure 2: Dillo with multiple open tabs. The bug symbol to the lower right shows the number of HTML errors that have been found on the page.

Dillo provides limited support for CSS 2, which permits the browser to render modern web pages in a more appealing fashion than most of the other browsers discussed here. However, it cannot compete with the quality found using NetSurf. Still, Dillo needs only about a fourth of the resources used by NetSurf under similar conditions. It is also leaner and takes up only 1.3MB of space on the disk. Just as with NetSurf, the user has many settings options. These include everything from the size of the navigation buttons to the detailed settings of the renderer and more. Therefore, it makes sense to work on the configuration file dillorc

Dillo displays the number of embedded images it is loading during a page build. It also shows the size of the page that has been downloaded and how many HTML errors it contains. There is a small issue, however. With default settings, Dillo issues numerous debugging messages in the terminal where it has been invoked. When called via a menu in the operating system, you won't notice this.