[nmglug] why are web browsers so memory-heavy?

[Mark Galassi]

I sometimes think that a fun project would be "8.04 forever": something
that keeps ubuntu 8.04 LTS going for the rest of time.  Specifically its
memory requirements.  That's because:

Last night I tried taking a discarded "windows 2000 vintage" computer
(1/2 gig RAM), putting tiny core linux on it, and then using tiny core's
mechanism for installing the firefox that they provide, which is
presumably a low-resource version.

The result was dreadful: you use firefox and it immediately uses all
RAM.  Even a 1gig machine cannot work with current versions.

Now the standard advice given is "don't use a very old distro for
low-RAM machines since it will miss security and other bug fixes; you
should instead use a modern distro that's tailored for low resource".

The problem is that people will want a browser that's featureful enough
(i.e. not dillo or any other simple html renderer).

Today I looked at qupzilla, but I have not yet tried it on a
low-resource machine.  I suspect that a lot of the problem lies in
interactions with the X server, buffers, offscreen pixmaps, and many
other things I know only a bit about.

Anyone have any real knowledge on low-resource browsing?