All of these recommendations for Falkon, Palemoon, Seamonkey. Honestly? None of these really make a difference to me, and Falkon actually runs like shit while not really reducing resource use!
Librewolf genuinely runs perfectly for me while taking up slightly (like 10%) more ram and vastly less cpu time. And it being a fork of Firefox, I can easily use all the addons I need (or can afford) to browse the web.
With Falkon stuff barely worked, was slow, and features were missing. With Librewolf, h264ify and a Youtube video as an embed within a tab. I can watch 720p/30fps video without issue. It baffles me on why this concept even exists, when the problem that is the modern web creates is that you really can’t make a new, much less lightweight, browser or engine.
And I don’t particularly care for Ladybird.
Okay but what shitbox are you running?
Thank you for asking imaginary poster in my head. Intel Atom N2600 with 1GB of DDR3 ram. It sucks. And it is testament to me just how nonsensical lightweight web browsers are, I’m sure that it’s Antix that is making it all work. Also I wrote this post on this shitty netbook and it’s weirdly smooth happily enough.
I recently played with an old Dothan Thinkpad with 1 gb ram, and tried almost every different Linux browser there is. I think Pale Moon was the only browser where Youtube was somewhat useable, and it was generally faster than Firefox. I think this information will be very valuable to society.
since the platform code is single-process it does struggle a lot when you start opening multiple tabs of modern, JS-heavy sites on limited processors, whereas multi-process browsers handle that better but at the same time consume way more memory. so it’s really good for limited RAM, but not quite so good for limited CPU.
personally i’ve found it to be kinda slow on my thinkpad X200, fairly usable on my X230 with AVX1, and a dream to use on my L13 with AVX2.
in any case, pale moon (and any other UXP browser) is goated mainly cuz of the modularity and freedom. the XUL addon ecosystem is insanely powerful and the browser is just customizable af without making unnecessary changes that break those customizations usually. it’s also an actually-viable alternative to the web engine duopoly.