Hi, I'm the author of that blog post!

I actually used Firefox at the time of this post but I now use Librewolf. Modern day web browsing actually isn't as demanding as you think it is: I've been able to happily have Firefox open with Discord in it and FreeTube (an electron app for watching YouTube) on a Pentium T4300 with 4GB of RAM.

It was slow but it worked perfectly fine, you just have to have patience to use older hardware. Hope this clears that up :)

(As an aside, my main PC now uses KDE instead of i3wm!)

Thanks for replying!

An ad blocker helps a lot and is essential for doing web browsing on older or underpowered hardware.

What is modern web browsing good for besides engagement and advertising?

Where do you find and read technical documentation?

Generally such websites work fine in older browsers and with JS disabled.

Complaining about things where the engagement failed.

That's the same thing as engagement.

It’s not really. Because engagement stops when you complain. Which means by exclusion it’s not engagement :)

Bad publicity is still publicity. They got you if you complain.

The only winning move is not to play.

I have a machine with a N4500, and it's actually fine for web browsing in regular Firefox.

The main problem I experience with it are: 1) Go compile times on some projects, and 2) JS frontend builds.

The Go compiler is fairly fast, but there are some patterns that can make the compiler much slower, and the difference can be pretty dramatic.

I don't do that much frontend stuff and many projects are fine, but some projects are just a horse to build. At my last job it took at least ~5G of RAM and ~3 minutes on my i5-8350U (never tried on the N4500). This is a main reason I bought a new machine; otherwise I'd still be using the i5 (a second-hand x280 I got for ~€200 because the screen on the N4500 broke, although that has magically fixed itself in the meanwhile and now I have 3 laptops).

I tried to use an ancient Asus Chromebox as my main desktop for a while, maybe three years ago. Old dual-core celeron processor, I wanna say 8GB of memory but it might have been 4.

The only usable browsers were very-light WebKit ones, and even then, more than three tabs was no good, and heavier “webapps” weren’t an option, unusably slow. Firefox and Chrome were unusable, period, and “lightweight” options based on their engines are not very lightweight at all. It had to be WebKit.

Wild that with the early ‘00s Web I could browse far more capably on machines 1/10 that powerful.

[edit] I mean, it was a chromebox by brand but I was running Void Linux on it.

I recently had the pleasure of using an old low-end laptop running Windows Vista from around 2005 which had a lower-end CPU and like 1 or 2 GB of RAM.

It was surprisingly snappy and usable.