Might need to make sacrifices such as disabling JS or loading images. Browsers and web pages are so bloated, you won't be able to get a modern experience with that hardware.
Even with a tiny OS and desktop, 2GB RAM is gonna fill up super fast. Modern websites are bloated af, there's no browser in the world that can fix that
Haiku would scream on that, but I'm not sure on the browser situation. On any OS any browser lately is a memory hog.
Lynx
get more ram asap if you can
w3m
This is an absolutely bottom of the barrel machine nowadays. You'll be able to run Linux on it, but nothing is going to run "fast". Especially not a webbrowser with modern websites.
If you're actually considering using this machine, the two most important upgrades you can make are SSD instead of HDD, and a bit more RAM (8GB if possible). With the ~2011-2012 CPU (judging by the release date of the iGPU listed) and the mentioned upgrades, you should have a usable (although slow) workstation for light tasks. Without the upgrades, be prepared to wait for things to load.
links. I ran firefox on a 4G RAM laptop until recently and it was painful and always swapping.
Maybe Pale Moon, Basilisk or maybe some WebKit-based browser like LuaKit or similar, or Chawan if u want to go hardcore.
Also please use a WM, not a DE, maybe PekWM if u're on X11 or something similar on Wayland.
Try to use some tweaks such as Ananicy, Bpftune, gamemode (and use only one or two programs at once), try to get some disk swap, and use ZRAM or ZSwap to avoid overusing your (slow) disk swap.
I have two netbooks with Atom processors, 2 GB RAM and one of them has an HDD instead of an SSD. I tried plenty of graphical browsers and Min was the best by far. Neither Firefox, Chromium, Falkon, Midori or GNOME Web could work at least partially smoothly in those machines. Min was not a panacea, but it was definitely more usable.
Yeah, none are going to be fast. Browsing is going to be slow no matter what, unless you use something like lynx. The best I can give you is Falkon, but don't open many tabs.
Do you suppose window managers would perform well in such cases ???
Sure, a WM will run fine and leaves you with more resources to work with. Your setup will still struggle running a modern browser.
Qutebrowser
none. 15 year old apu, slow laptop hdd, 2gb ram (some consumed by the graphics). cpu performance of the earliest s939 dual core athlons.
put a puppy or antix on it, i guess, and hope for the best. with the 8gb max and a small sata ssd it could run something more mainstream.
update to add: i just reinstalled the latest antix-full over the top of my old one that runs on an old athlon dual core (am2+ 4gb and hdd). creeps a bit over 1gb ram used once you load a page up in firefox. it'll be 'usable', i guess, running one thing at a time and not going crazy with open tabs and windows. still gonna go back on the recycle pile though. i have too many of this era desktop, no takers for them, and not enough room to store 'em.
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