I’ve tried Firefox limited to 1 GB for a laugh. It’s usable. It won’t do many tabs at the same time but it’s usable.
You can actually go lower than that but you’ll start to run into limitations with YouTube videos etc.
There are also other browsers out there that are more light-weight but perhaps not as feature-full as Firefox. Giving up extensions alone reduces a lot of complexity. If you fire up the package installer on any Linux distro and search for “browser” you’ll find a ton. There aren’t many engines but there are a lot of browsers.
With cgroups, it’s a standard kernel feature. You can limit RAM, CPU, network access, lots of things. It’s used in Docker, LXC, Kubernetes and lots of container solutions.
There’s Linux dists that can only requires less than 200 MB of RAM. Absolute Linux for an example, has a minimum system requirement of 64 MB RAM. Plenty of space left for memory hungry softwares like a browser.
I’m not sure a modern day browser would be just fine with “only” 2GiB, unfortunately.
Maybe with zRAM and a bit of swap it could run quite ok 🤷
4GB works. My kids use a T410 from 2010 with a SSD and it is a pleasant experience for daily use (browsing, YouTube, small Linux games)
I’ve tried Firefox limited to 1 GB for a laugh. It’s usable. It won’t do many tabs at the same time but it’s usable.
You can actually go lower than that but you’ll start to run into limitations with YouTube videos etc.
There are also other browsers out there that are more light-weight but perhaps not as feature-full as Firefox. Giving up extensions alone reduces a lot of complexity. If you fire up the package installer on any Linux distro and search for “browser” you’ll find a ton. There aren’t many engines but there are a lot of browsers.
Interesting. How do you limit RAM for an application?
With cgroups, it’s a standard kernel feature. You can limit RAM, CPU, network access, lots of things. It’s used in Docker, LXC, Kubernetes and lots of container solutions.
That’s what palemoon is for. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but if you don’t have the RAM to run
crysislibrewolf on high it’ll work.There’s Linux dists that can only requires less than 200 MB of RAM. Absolute Linux for an example, has a minimum system requirement of 64 MB RAM. Plenty of space left for memory hungry softwares like a browser.
Im using a 4gb laptop with Xfce, and its definitely struggling sometimes. Even though it’s usable, I doubt 2gb would be enough
Lynx 4 Life!