I bought a raspberry pi the other day. My kids showed zero interest so far, but maybe they are too old for it. For the web, on a scale of 1 to 10 I'd say it was crap, but that's mainly cos I tried netflix and it couldn't even navigate the site in any usable fashion. Too old to waste hours on it. The raspberry pi cluster is cool though.

Only just started using Opera so a bit disappointed if that's going down the tubes. It feels faster than firefox.

Firefox fairly often freezes on ebay login on both my 7 and xp boxes, and the machine then needs rebooting to use firefox again [ending the process doesn't fix it].

K-Meleon is a nice idea but a bit spartan.

On my retro boxes [up to athlon 1.6ghz] I use an old firefox where I can. But I would only visit sites I need to.

My mac 5500 used to be my main email/browsing/ebay box. That's not been realistic for 5+ years now - way too slow and the browsers it could run cxan't keep up with content..

I would not browse very much on anything below an athlon xp or equivalent, and even then not as a main machine.

Well - all I can say is this. I had a long hiatus from internet usage and finally got back on about four years ago. I started out with a P3/500 running 98SE,. then switched to a P3/1000 still running 98SE. When it got to where I couldn't run a modern enough browser to do anything, I switched to PC Linux on the P3/100 and then finally on an Athlon XP2400+ (still currently my internet box)

I frequently use a EEEPC 900 and a tablet. The old Eee has only a Celeron M 900 MHz and I find it adequate as long as Flash isn't used much (get Flashblock for Firefox.)

The fastest ARM tablets aren't much faster than that hardware. This is undoubtedly part of why Flash is dead on them. And why there has been so much effort put into browser javascript performance.

swaaye wrote:

The fastest ARM tablets aren't much faster than that hardware. This is undoubtedly part of why Flash is dead on them. And why there has been so much effort put into browser javascript performance.

Hmm, I wonder how viable it would be to run a webkit-based browser on an older/slower machine and use a user agent faker addon to report that it is a mobile browser?

The fastest browser is Lynx. Well, it would be if it didn't ask you to confirm every cookie 😜

leileilol wrote:

robertmo wrote:

GPU hardware acceleration

I never saw the need for that in a browser, and I think it's one of the hyped up bullshit things that make a browser slower.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsyogXtyU9o

That's not the same thing.

ATI never got Direct2D / DirectWrite working without corruption on the 4000 series. With Firefox at least.

And yeah I'm not sure when it is actually a performance booster. The slowest things to render on web pages are applets like Flash. I use Flash Block on my EeePC for a big speed boost.

d1stortion wrote:

Maybe a 1.4 GHz Tualatin, better something with SSE2 for Flash GPU acceleration, Win XP. I completely fail to see the point of setting up an old rig for these tasks though?

I don't think a 1.4ghz Tualatin is going to cut it. My Athlon Neo 1.6ghz is faster than that and maxes out to 100% whenever flash is active.

@Sliderider

I had a Athlon Neo notebook too until recently. It had a discrete Radeon 3450 and I was displeased with that chip, because it was a heat source, sucked at 3D and didn't support Flash acceleration. But I discovered that Catalyst 9.11 has unofficial support for Flash acceleration on HD 3000 GPUs. It is a little flakey in that it'll drop back to software decode if you fiddle with the Flash player too much but I was able to play 720p that way.

However I was never able to find the official Mobility package of 9.11 so was forced to manually install the desktop package. A pain to say the least.

I personally wouldn't go any older than Core 2 Duo for browsing the modern Web, because Flash eats all the CPU cycles. Flashblock does help, thankfully.

Still, sometimes I do get a Web page that totally maxes out one of my cores for whatever dumb reason, be it Flash or crappy JavaScript or whatever, and I have to flip through Task Manager and kill it. Just trying to do that or any other form of multi-tasking on a single-core CPU that's saturated will be agonizing.

Modern browsers are also RAM hogs if you pile on the tabs, to the point where even 8 GB can be consumed mostly by the browser. Won't be an issue if you keep the open tabs to a minimum, though.

While I was waiting for my laptop's replacement HDD to be delivered a while back, I recorded a video of the Good Old Games website rendering on my old Pentium III rig under Xubuntu 8.04:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pygQJqb9MZs

Just posting it here to give an idea of how modern web renders on an old system.

QlShdR wrote:

Hey fellas, […]
Show full quote

Hey fellas,

I was wondering about what rig and OS + softwares would be the absolute minimum for the following tasks:

- browsing the web relatively comfortably (maybe 480p YouTube would be nice too, but it's not THAT of a big deal, if the Flash plugin is not working, if otherwise I can use Google and various forums, maybe facebook too)
- able to run some old Skype build with audio call
- IRC
- ICQ
- listening to various bitrate *.mp3s
- watching DivX / XviD
- seeding with a torrent client (older Azureus or uTorrent build preferably)

Well I understand that the main bottlenecks could be 480p YouTube, DivX and torrents, so let's seperate the needs for two rigs and let's see how they compete with each other; so one rig for everything that was mentioned above, and one rig without YouTube, torrent and DivX.

As an additional guideline, I have a pure 5 mbit ADSL connection, so no telephone line (or TV subscription) at all.

Let's discuss. : )

For most of the things that you mentioned, a Pentium M with a couple gigs of RAM and a lightweight build of Linux or a performance-optimized build of XP would do just fine. You may even be able to get away with a bit less, but this is what I consider to be the baseline of a usable websurfing PC nowadays.

I think anything bellow a a fast dual P3 will have a hard time with newer websites and 480p youtube...