Have you tried disabling "smooth scrolling" ? Should be under the same option tab as hardware acceleration. With it disabled, you should be able to scroll a lot faster on a slow system, but obviously it won't be as "smooth".

How much RAM do you have in that system? XP is absolutely horrible on anything less than 1GB.

I have exactly 1GB, and an SSD 🤣

I've already disabled smooth scrolling, it feels a bit better.

I didnt though scrolling would use so much CPU it feels like there is no hardware acceleration. I forced it into the "about:config" page but it's the same. Graphics card is an FX5500 with latest drivers.

Maybe an option exists for rendering things 1 time and avoid triggering too much actions when scrolling?

cyclone3d wrote:

XP is absolutely horrible on anything less than 1GB.

I beg to differ. I have it running on a P3 800MHz with 768MB RAM and it works smooth as butter.

Palemoon and Firefox in general are very overloaded for such a system, though. It's been a while since I used those but I remember scrolling always being sluggish on an older machine.

The only browser that was still somewhat useable on Windows 98 (and XP, too) has been K-Meleon. They are using Firefox as a base but have built their own interface around it which is cluttered as hell but feels a lot more responsive.

http://kmeleonbrowser.org/

Oww thanks ill try this one !

I tried Dillo, super smooth but doesn't handle CSS correctly at all

So I tested K-Meleon. It's slightly faster than Pale Moon, but the big difference is when I force the hardware acceleration ON in the options. Now it's super smooth for simple sites like Vogons. For some reason the hardware acceleration didn't produced the same results in Pale Moon (I suspect it just didnt worked).

About using XP on this hardware, it's complicated since it's halfway between the typical w98 setups (p2/ p3 with 128mb ram) and typical XP setups (p4 with 512mb/1gb). Anyway it still works well, in many benchmarks XP overhead is between 0% - 20% performance loss

schmatzler wrote:

I beg to differ. I have it running on a P3 800MHz with 768MB RAM and it works smooth as butter. […]
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cyclone3d wrote:

XP is absolutely horrible on anything less than 1GB.

I beg to differ. I have it running on a P3 800MHz with 768MB RAM and it works smooth as butter.

Palemoon and Firefox in general are very overloaded for such a system, though. It's been a while since I used those but I remember scrolling always being sluggish on an older machine.

The only browser that was still somewhat useable on Windows 98 (and XP, too) has been K-Meleon. They are using Firefox as a base but have built their own interface around it which is cluttered as hell but feels a lot more responsive.

http://kmeleonbrowser.org/

768MB may be ok if you have a clean system with not hardly anything running in the background.... but from experience.. at least with business systems that were running Pentium 4 CPUs and 512MB of RAM, it was absolutely horrible. Bump up to 1GB (If the company would actually be willing to spend $35-50 back then - most of the time they wouldn't and then complain that their system was running slow even though we told them what needed to be done to fix it) and it helped a lot and there was actually some free RAM available. 768MB would be cutting it way, way, way too close for a system that is actually used for anything that uses any amount of RAM.

If it is working for you, great.. I just don't like it with less than 1GB.

Browsing on anything single core is a chore.

An important thing to remember when it comes to web browsing on old machines, is that the web browser, as well as the OS, must be optimized in order to do tasks better.

Also, when it comes to hardware acceleration, the driver version of your graphics card matters. Not all the driver versions are actually supported by the web browser you are using and so it might default to software mode, consuming CPU.

On my 1.4Ghz Tualatin with 1,2GB of RAM, I use Mozilla Firefox 28 Beta 9 with several about:config optimizations and extensions in order to reduce load on RAM and CPU and using the machine for web browsing is quite good. Many sites scroll very fast and smooth with it. It's also important to say that my graphics card is a 6800GT, which is way faster than a FX5500 (I had it in the past, and personally I don't miss it). So if you begin to optimize the OS and the browser itself, as well as checking different driver versions to see which one runs better with your browser, you'll definitely see differences. By the way, I strongly recommend Firefox 28 Beta 9 as it's one of the oldest versions of Firefox that support the modern web, including HTML5, and it's not as bloated as later versions are.

PM me if you want, I can hand you my prefs.js files and my extensions list to use with FF 28 Beta 9 so you can check if it will make a difference on your machine. It used to run well back when I had a 1Ghz Coppermine and now runs even better with the Tualatin.