# looking for a decent internet browser - browser reviews

i have been looking for a decent minimalist internet browser

maximalist internet browsers are pretty much a figured out case, they
pretty much only differ by the degree of spying they do on you and what
ad-dons do they support

meanwhile minimalist browsers, that do not have full control - now that
is of interest to me

what i am looking for:
- http basic auth support
- gopher support
- good enough basic html rendering
- tabs
- image rendering one way or another
- good enough customisation

the estimated ram usage number is for two tabs/windows one with search
for Tokyo on lite.duckduckgo.com and other with Tokyo wikipedia page

the versions are from Nixos repos as of the date of writing this
article (2024-08-18)

and then running this command:

 ps -eo size,pid,user,command --sort -size |\
    awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.2f Mb ",hr) } { for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ ) { printf("%s ",$x) } print "" }' |\
    cut -d "" -f2 | cut -d "-" -f1 | grep $browsername

for comparison and fairness, here are the numbers for my highly customised
firefox and chrome clones

chrome - 4500 Mb (wtf) (of course there is some process per tab magic
happening, but this is not wizardry school

firefox - 1200 Mb (more sensible)


## links2

estimated ram usage: 65.6 Mb (-g option)

used to be my main browser for a long long time in the past (so far only
one that achieved that high aim, not being a maximalist browser)

still i consider it one of the best, but is challenged by lack of tab
support and patching it in, like i did it for a bit, has its limitations

also no gopher support which kinda makes it secondary

also wrote an article on it -
<https://dataswamp.org/~lich/musings/links-browser.html>

really nice graphical mode that i love

and very good default keybindings that i want to move to any browser i use


## elinks

estimated ram usage: 28 Mb

could be pretty good, but no http basic auth support which makes it
useless for me

huge shame, as it has tabs, and could do image rendering one way or
another

it does not have graphical mode like links2 (twibright links), but well
it still can do  a nice job - i wish someone (or i) did port that feature
into elinks

and also wrote an article on it, but was a lot more positive than i am
now, it failed on its promises  -

<gopher://dataswamp.org/0/~lich/notes-elinks.md>

## lynx

estimated ram usage: 18 Mb (two windows)

never really liked it, terrible defaults

probably should give it more time, but god does it look bad

## w3m

estimated ram usage: 21 Mb

ditto

## netsurf

estimated ram usage: 156 MB

extremely buggy and difficult to use, lack of good customisation options,
no gopher support

## dillo

estimated ram usage: 56 MB

currently testing it, good impressions so far but is buggy and prone
to crashes

but can browse gopher, though not that great of type support

also there is a mess of forks if dillo/dillo-plus/dillong

i think we should support mainline dillo, as the rest is quite not aware
of their direction, and as we can see, market is really separated

from what i've heard from a person with complex nickname on #bitreich-en
channel, this one is actually runnable on old machines thanks to mbedtls
so - cool!

## Ladybird

estimated ram usage: lmao crashed before even opened tokyo page

no basic auth support, extremely slow and buggy, maybe has potential
but real lack of awareness of what it wants to be

## palemoon

estimated ram usage - 845.07 Mb

this is a maximalist browser sir which explodes in ram usage and
can get extremely slow due to trying to run js

with nojs it might make sense, but i need more experience with it

still has lots of potential, and if you remove js engine from
it, it might do the task good enough

now the more i think about it, i think it might be pretty good middle
way, and will actually work due to extreme hard work from
the uncontroversial developer, i will update this when i test it

it can access gopher though overbite addon:

 => gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/overbite/files/old/overbite-ff4-1627.xpi
## conclusion

i do not know yet what is the answer to this problem,
life is an experiment

if you know any browser and you'd like me to test it, feel
free to email me, i enjoy the surprise