Lightweight Windows Browsers

Posted in Cloud Computing, Software

While IE, Chrome and FireFox are competing with each other to be the best browser… they sometimes forget that not everybody has the latest and greatest computer to be able to run their browser with a pletora of extensions, plugins, addons, fancy skins at Windows 7. Some people — older laptop users specifically — with slimmer memory profile computers and operating systems want all the modern features the web has to offer, but without the bells & whistles … aka a lightweight browser.

Widely available on the Linux platform, but hard to get in Microsoft Windows. So no need for a list, as there aren’t that many browsers that can do the job (pass the ACID browser test). Or are there?

K-meleon comes close to completing the test, and is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser based on the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla which is also used by Firefox. K-Meleon takes up 15MB of RAM. While FireFox with the FasterFox Lite v3.9.1 extension — in comparison — takes up a whopping 54MB! Using K-meleon as an entry point things get interesting; list of alternatives!

I also tried and tested SlimBrowser.net … looks nice, but although the installation file is just 2MB, it seems to use .NET libraries to bring a IE-alike experience … eating up 50-60MB of RAM. Arora — based on QtWebKit — used up a very disappointing 100+ MB of RAM.

Next one of my list is QtWeb. QtWeb does things slightly different; it’s based on Nokia’s Qt framework and Apple’s webkit rendering engine. Pleasant browsing experience, but with 40-50MB of RAM it cannot compete with K-meleon. Neither can CometBird … without doing anything takes up 61MB.

Myeah there were a few other in my list still, but K-Meleon is my new champion and lightweight recommendation! Make sure you perform these optimization tweaks after installation to increase performance even further!