All about resources...

Even though I'm on vacations, I can't sit still for very long and keep myself away either from my laptop or experimenting with my Raspberry Pi (I can feel my wife's look piercing through the back of my neck...).

I'm constantly looking for new ways to optimize my laptop, in order to keep myself away from Amazon and buy more RAM to upgrade it and to give me some more "manoeuvring room" when running some specific software with veeery specific hardware requirements. When trying to keep the usage of my resources (CPU, RAM and GPU) low, nowadays, we need start to have a look at our web browsers. Every time we search for a new browser benchmark, the usual suspects are the ones being under the microscope: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Brave and Edge.

We all can agree that Chrome and Firefox are very good browsers, both are very resource hungry monsters. Safari is pretty much Mac oriented, and let's face it, not everyone can afford one, so I can't really see the point of having a product-specific browser on those benchmarks. Opera was a very interesting tool until 2016, when they were bought by an Asian consortium and things became very blurry when it came to privacy and funding of the project. And Edge... well, although Edge was a huge step forward by Microsoft, it's still a download tool for Chrome and Firefox (don't laugh... you know it's true).

My last post on LinkedIn was about the Vivaldi browser being the first ever browser to be implemented in the automotive industry (again... kudos for the Vivaldi team!), so I though "I'm sure there's more than an handful of browsers that could be tested and used"... so I went on and searched through out Middle Earth (me and my LOTR references... sheesh) for new quests.

I've gathered what I thought to be the best candidates for this tests: Vivaldi, Pale Moon, Comodo IceDragon, K-Meleon and I went and stretched out to install Opera GX. I already had Brave browser installed, so I just rolled with it. Brave was one of the best surprises in the last few years, mostly because of it's advanced privacy settings and its close relation with the world of cryptocurrencies, which I'm a big fan of.

I had already a NVMe m.242 with Windows 10 in it, so I went for it, instead using the OS that I normally use, GhostBSD. That would be cheating :)

The resources on my laptop are: DDR4 8GB RAM, 128GB NVMe m.242 and Intel i7 (7th Gen) CPU. No need to mention the laptop's builder.

After installing all browsers, I've opened 4 tabs with the exactly same thing on all of them: distrowatch.com, linuxmint.com, and two youtube.com tabs running videos at the same time.

K-Meleon was the first victim to fall to this test... All four tabs were opened, but YouTube simply won't run in it. Mostly because since YouTube moved from Flash to HTML5 (good move there), K-Meleon didn't change that and did not evolved to HTML5 support. As a result, K-Meleon was uninstalled. Tough break K-Meleon...

Pale Moon was the next victim to fall. Although there was a good aspect when you try to access a specific URL. The browser asks you about the installation of certificates from the "get go". You can keep track of all certificates installed, like in any other browser, but on Pale Moon you can control the installation right at the start. However, after starting all four tabs and running the videos, the browser froze. I mean, proper froze out and stayed like that, until I killed the task. Another one hit the dust. Uninstalled.

All the other 4 browsers behaved themselves admirably!

To note, Opera GX does have a special tab on the side bar where you can limit the RAM and CPU usage (awsome, right?) but that was not used and everything was set as default.

At this point, the "scores" were the following:

IceDragon was the "Pacman" here at the top, but trying to compensate with more CPU usage, rather than RAM usage. The same was happening with Brave which was admirable. Opera GX was actually surprising me quite a bit, because we are talking about a gaming-specific browser, so it would be expected for it to expand its consume all over the place, but it didn't. Vivaldi was actually my favourite, but not only it was consuming more resources than Opera GX, the power usage was actually going off the roof as well. But, all in all, not bad.

Why was not a proper benchmark done here? Yeah, I could go to https://browserbench.org and run all benchmarks available there, but would it be real? No. Real benchmark requires real usage. A normal user opens YouTube, Gmail or some other Email service, Amazon or Ebay. A normal user does not perform benchmarks. If the browser is slow, they blame it on the machine, not on the software.

As a result for this small experience, all four browsers were the winners. Mostly because if we compared the results with the usual suspects, we would see that these four would be well behind Chrome and Firefox.

Privacy-wise, I would trust Brave and Vivaldi, mostly because of the huge privacy rules that can be adjusted by us directly on the browser itself and not only because both are based out of Chromium, but also because both were actually built for privacy.

I hope to have some feedback on this article! I feel that I've lost touch when it comes to writes this kind of stuff, after so much time without writing anything :)