Ultra-lightweight web browser?

Question

Are there any good super-lightweight graphical web browsers out there? I'd like to be able to browse the web on an old PC, but the mainstream crop of browsers is just too heavy, and I don't want to resort to something like Lynx. There must be something decent out there that'll fit in 16 or 32MB of RAM comfortably.

100% standards compliance isn't necessary, but I'd like something that supports the most widely used parts of CSS and JavaScript. The goal is to get 98% of sites usable in a nice, graphical format.

Answer 1

Check out K-Meleon

K-Meleon:

K-Meleon 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 is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License and is designed specifically for Microsoft Windows (Win32) operating systems.

What are the system requirements?

• Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server fully supported. Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, Windows NT 4.0 generally supported with updated Microsoft libraries.
• 32 MB RAM minimum recommended.
• 6 MB of free hard drive space for download. 18 MB of free hard disk space for full installation.

Answer 2

Another to look at is TheWorld Browser Based on the Trident rendering engine, it just pips k-melon in terms of private bytes on my system, but only by a few hundred K. :)

Answer 3

May I suggest Nimi Haku

Description from the site

Nimi Haku is a minimalistic web browsing terminal designed for large webpage view space along with intuitive open and in-history webpages navigation. Webpage favicon is displayed along its title in taskbar for faster access and nicer enviroment integration. It also offers support for user CSS and JavaScript as well as inbuilt ads clearing mechanism.

and yes I'm using it for my office PC(old Celeron PC)

Answer 4

Uzbl is quite good. It's a webkit-based browser that tries to be as UNIXy as possible: sockets to manipulate the program, scriptable functionality, etc.

Answer 5

SkipStone is a lean Web browser for environments that support Gtk+ (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows). It uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine.

Answer 6

I'm not sure about its memory usage, but you might want to look at Midori

Answer 7

Quite some time ago, I tried SlimBrowser that is relatively lightweight, and runs on a PII-200 with 32MB RAM. You might want to give it a shot.

Answer 8

Using Cygwin you can compile Links or Links2 with X support and run them on the Cygwin X server. This gives you about the compatibility you'd get with Off By One.

Answer 9

Older versions of Opera were well known for efficiency and low RAM usage. Might have to go pretty far back to find something that will work on a 32MB system though.

I have plenty of experience with Off-By-One on a 256MB system, but not a 32MB system.

You probably can add more RAM to your old system extremely cheaply. I would max it out if possible.