Most Resource Friendly Browser

[Buffaloed]

I've been trying to help a friend find the best browser for her under powered laptop while she's stuck working from home.

It looks like Comodo Dragon is the winner and Microsoft Edge is the runner up.

These were all with the same 6 tabs open.

Comodo Dragon is Chrome without the goo. It's almost indistinguishable from Chrome when you install it. It will import everything from Chrome, look just like Chrome, and ask to set your search engine to Yahoo. It's only available in 32 bit and takes up just 71 GB. It's a good choice if you have limited disk space and it has an option to install a portable version.

Comodo Ice Dragon does the same thing with Firefox. It's uses almost as memory and in my tests it crashed often.

Firefox is getting better. But it still consumes too much memory. That takes up about 200 GB on the hard drive.

I don't know why Chrome is using so much CPU. It seems to do it unpredictably. It takes up 800 GB on my hard drive. I'd uninstall it if I didn't need it for testing.

Vivaldi is Opera's Chrome clone. It has a different GUI and you have to reinstall Chrome extensions. It takes up 425 GB.

Click to read more...

 

[Osprey]

Did you test with the new Edge, the one that's based on Chromium, just like Chrome and, I presume, Comodo Dragon?

This is going to be interesting only to people who like to keep lots and lots of tabs open, but a Chrome extension called The Great Suspender has been a life saver for me. What it does is suspend tabs that you haven't visited in a while (like a certain number of hours that you set), which frees up most of their memory. The tab doesn't go anywhere and unsuspends when you click on it. I have about 200 tabs open across a dozen Chrome windows that used to take up about 6GB, but now take up less than 2GB. Basically, with the extension, it doesn't matter how many tabs that you have open and they're not liable to take up much more than 2GB because only the ones that you've visited most recently will be consuming memory. It really solves one of the biggest issues that I've had with Chrome, and, like I said, it's been a life saver because those 200 tabs don't bring my old laptop to its knees anymore.

 

[Buffaloed]

Did you test with the new Edge, the one that's based on Chromium, just like Chrome and, I presume, Comodo Dragon?

This is going to be interesting only to people who like to keep lots and lots of tabs open, but a Chrome extension called The Great Suspender has been a life saver for me. What it does is suspend tabs that you haven't visited in a while (like a certain number of hours that you set), which frees up most of their memory. The tab doesn't go anywhere and unsuspends when you click on it. I have about 200 tabs open across a dozen Chrome windows that used to take up about 6GB, but now take up less than 2GB. Basically, no matter how many tabs open you have, they'll probably not take up any more than 2GB because you're unlikely to have more than a dozen active at any one time. It really solves one of the biggest issues that I've had with Chrome, and, like I said, it's been a life saver because those 200 tabs don't bring my old laptop to its knees anymore.

That is the new Edge. Thanks for the info on the extension. She has no discipline when it comes to closing things she isn't using. She's a university professor in Argentina where the exchange rate is 1 ARS = 0.0146 USD and computers are grossly overpriced.
https://www.fravega.com/l/informatica/notebooks/

 

[RandV]

Will existing Chrome extension work in Comodo or do you have to lose those?

 

[Buffaloed]

Will existing Chrome extension work in Comodo or do you have to lose those?

They all work with Comodo. It actually syncs with Chrome and imports your extensions. BTW I discovered that the portable apps versions of Chrome and FF are very resource friendly. They don't have all that crap running in the background. Also found that FF has an extension called New Tab Suspender that does the same thing as The Great Suspender.