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....Just ditched I.E. because it was impossibly slow on a very old Pentium WinXP laptop. Saw that Google claim Chrome to be designed for speed, installed it, definitely slower than I.E.6!

IdeasVacuum wrote:....Just ditched I.E. because it was impossibly slow on a very old Pentium WinXP laptop. Saw that Google claim Chrome to be designed for speed, installed it, definitely slower than I.E.6!

I switched from Firefox to Chrome, as Chrome runs faster on the Mac. It runs quite well on Win7 too, dunno about XP!

Hi
The 2 fastest browsers for slow or old hardware computers:

1 Kmeleon
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
2 Qtweb
http://www.qtweb.net/

When using kmeleon copy the contents of the plugin folder from an installed firefox browser
to the kmeleon plugin folder, for flash, winmediaplayer, etc, etc to work with kmeleon.
greetings
cw

Did you try Opera ?

What kind of slowness are you experiencing, btw?

Is it like interaction slowness with animations? (minimize/maximize, page scrolling, etc)?

If so might want to verify you have proper graphics drivers installed for your graphics adapter.

And what exactly is an "aging Pentium" ? what speed is it?
Could you have spyware running amok on the system? Something tying up the CPU ?

Of course this IS a laptop, so if its a really old model, it could just be the way it is.. But you might want to check any power saving options that might be turned on as well.

The most thing people report for a speed increase in a laptop besides adding RAM, is by replacing the mechanical HDD with an SSD.

Even the most recent IE is a lot faster than 6.

Chrome is supposed to be faster than the rest, but the most recent FireFox is close...and I use the palemoon.org version. It has the 386 instructions removed, along with all of the handicap features, and it is also compiled just for Windows. Basically, they removed features most folks don't use, and make it work with "current" hardware only. Those changes supposedly speed up FireFox by another 10% or so. I don't know how well it works with a slow xp box, but I sure like it.

I don't now much about other browsers, but if you have a strict limit
amount of RAM, you can set opera to not use RAM. Of course it will
use a little, but it will minimize this amount as good as it can.
If you dont have much size of HDD-Space, you can say opera, how
much size it is allowed to use for his cache. And if you have a slow
hdd, you can set this to zero, too. But you should then use a little
ram, i think. Additional there are more settings that effect speed.

Like you can set how long opera should wait until it will render the
page. From instant to wait till everything is loaded. That will effect
the needed amount of resource for rendering, too.

Chrome and Opera are the fastest Browser when using JavaScript.
Thats my last information.

MFG PMV

I find Firefox 2 is fast, but you will have to put up with some increasingly badly rendered pages using older browsers.

QTWeb would be my vote for older systems.

QTWeb would be my vote for older systems.

Testing it out and seems to work ok so far and fully portable too when download zip file.
Thanks for link Kuron.

Try this one (1.2 MB standalone exe): http://offbyone.com/offbyone/

It won't run Flash or the latest stuff, but it's HTML 3.2 compliant, lightweight and fast on old PCs.

And interestingly, ZoneAlarm didn't alert me when this browser tried to access the internet!

I have an old laptop (700mhz, 192mb ram) and I find that Opera with all disc writes off, and limited to 20mb of cache ram (coupled with adblocker) it runs very very sweet.

*** edit - flash is NOT installed

flash isn't usable with such a slow PC. I have tried it with YouTube-Videos. 1 Second per Frame

Exactly - and it cripples the machine as well, so why allow them to run as adverts that get through the adblocker?

....Well, last one I tried was OffByOne and that definitely is the fastest but does not support CSS, just too ugly most times. So, the winner, by a country mile, is QtWeb. It is fairly nimble but still supports much of the newer technologies.

Thanks for your input everyone - I have learnt a lot about browsers during this process. Components used to make OffByOne can be built into your own app (ala Web Gadget) and do not have a dependency on any other engine, which is cool. On the QtWeb site, they have a chart comparing browsers which is very very interesting: http://www.qtweb.net/compare.php