[Liverpool] Alternative browser suggestions

[Sebastian Arcus]

On 27/03/18 09:15, Sebastian Arcus via Liverpool wrote:
> Hello all!
> 
> I hope we are all well. I realise this could be a slightly contentious 
> issue, and might just start the next holy war - so please try and keep 
> the replies nice and steady! (if there will be any replies, that is) :-)
> 
> I am getting a little bit fed-up with Firefox being a bit of a pig at 
> devouring memory - and I was thinking of trying some other browser. I'm 
> not after anything particularly radical - just something a bit slimmer, 
> but still with a pretty complete modern feature set, to support whatever 
> the web throws at us these days. I only use 2-3 add-ons in Firefox, and 
> I think I can live without them - so add-on support is not particularly 
> important.
> 
> I thought the task would be easy - with maybe 2-3 choices out there on 
> Linux - but to my surprise, even the Slackware repo's list over a dozen 
> alternatives (and that is saying something!) :-)
> 
> Ideally I'd like something with a significant enough community - which 
> will hopefully mean it will be around a while.

Just a follow-up to my previous email about choosing a new browser. I've 
been using Brave (which is just Chromium with a slightly different skin 
and some privacy settings) for over a month now and I am really pleased 
with the change. OK - in terms of memory usage it is not ideal - after 
about a week of continuous usage, with about 8 tabs constantly open and 
others being opened and closed all the time, the total memory use is 
1.5GB - which is quite a bit. But considering I have that amount of ram 
spare, it isn't a problem.

However, the difference between Firefox starting to lag really badly 
after just one day of use, and Brave still being nice and responsive 
even after one week is enormous in terms of user experience and (lack 
of) frustration - at least for me.

Pretty much everything seems to work, and I haven't found any websites 
which misbehaved so far.

There are a few small niggles - such as the fact that Brave doesn't seem 
to have a setting to warn you if you are closing multiple tabs - and on 
occasion I've lost small amounts of input in open forms which were 
closed by mistake. Also, one add-on I used in Firefox was SQLite Manager 
to access and manipulate directly SQLite databases - and I haven't found 
another way to do that yet. But all in all it has made a big difference 
to my frustration levels - and that on its own is well worth it :)

By the way, after some googling, I used the following command to compute 
the total amount of RAM used by various Brave children - apparently it 
can be a really complicated topic because of the way memory management 
works in Linux and how some memory is shared among child processes and 
some is not - so it isn't accurate to just add up what you see with 'ps':

smem -t -k -c pss -P brave | tail -n 1