Comment by FabHK
2 months ago
Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.
One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be installed by default in most Linux distributions but I think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia says its also available on OSX and Windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
Chawan is nice
https://chawan.net/
Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.
https://www.netsurf-browser.org
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If only there was browser-as-a-service. That would load the pages over it's fast connection and show them to you.
I feel like there already was one, on HN a few years ago. If I remember right, they were hoping to charge $20/month.
Edit: Ah, this was it: https://mightyapp.webflow.io/
Didn’t want to upgrade the memory?
It’s the speed of the JavaScript compiler, on those old browsers they were expected to handle a few kilobytes max of event listeners. The chrome vs Firefox browser wars sped up JavaScript compilation by 10x at least
Yes I was alive for that. Just said that because that Mac could take up to 1.5GB of RAM