Works fine on my pi 500, not the fastest thing in the world but perfectly usable

The pi 4 and pi 5 both have 64 bit cpu architecture, though it's sort of possible that the 400 has a 32 bit OS (I just used the default one). Maybe I'll check into it and see if I can run an OS that I'm sure is 64 bit. Thanks!

Ah, oh well, thanks for the effort with homedepot. Yeah all sites on the 400 were bad, but homedepot was especially bad. I guess aliexpress is also pretty bad so if you can view that, it's a good sign ;).

If you're in the US, can you homedepot.com on your pi 3? How much ram does it have? That was interesting to hear. Thanks.

Thanks, I actually never tried Firefox on my 400. I only tried the built-in Raspbian browser which I think might be Chromium based. The 400 has 4GB of ram which should really be enough to view any reasonable web page, I hope? I mean just the one page, not 100 open tabs at the same time. Anyway, the 500+ has 16GB of ram, and I browse a lot right now with an x86 laptop with 4GB. So whatever the problem with the 400 was, I don't think it was ram per se. CPU too slow, SD card too low, browser too slow, some combination of the above.

I got the 400 for purposes unrelated for browsing and it worked fine for that. I only tried browsing a few times and it was awful, so I just didn't use it for that. But now I think of migrating from my laptop to a Pi 5 or 500, so have to ask about this.

They're my first raspberry pi devices. I'm wondering if the 64 bit architecture of the 5, vs the 32 bit of the 4 would be a big factor.

I'm really sorry, but I'm unable to get through to this website on the Pi 5 using ProtonVPN. I'm still getting that access denied dialog.

I'm able to get through on my work system via the corp VPN, I'm not sure why. I can see what you mean though, that website is awful even on an over-provisioned workstation.

I don't suppose you have a similar site to test against? if it's any consolation, I'm able to load up and navigate absolutely bullshit websites (in terms of bloat and performance) like ali express just fine.

Yeah, I have had firefox-esr running okay for years now on an ancient rPi 3 as a Home Assistant panel. I expect an rPi 5 would be able to run Firefox just fine.

I'd find it odd if a RPi4 can't smoothly run a browser :o

You can use btop, to monitor if you have a bottleneck on your CPU or RAM, if Swap memory gets used, things will slow down, if your CPU is clocking @ 100%, same thing but not much you can do about that besides perhaps weeding out unnessecary processes that consume a lot, if there are any.

In case your RAM is @ 100%, you could:

• Use LibreWolf instead of FireFox,
  it's an open source privacy focussed fork,
  which removes some of the FireFox bloaty stuff, which reduces RAM usage.
• Use uBlock Origin, to block advertisements, which will reduce RAM usage and increase page load speeds
• Use NoScript, to block JavaScript trackers, to further reduce RAM usage and increase page load speedd, beware, will block all JS by default, so sites will break, but can be manually fixed by re-enabling only the nessecary JS components on a site
• Switch to DietPi, a very light weight RAM/CPU friendly distro for SBCs like RPis, I've used it only headless (without GUI) but it only used 50Mb of RAM out of the box last time I monitorred it, which is impressively low.

That's good to hear, thanks. I wonder why the pi 4 is so bad. It's much worse than my lower-midrange mobile phone, for example.

Lol oops, thanks.

I've had zero issues with Firefox on either my pi 5, or Pi 500+.

I'm running KDE plasma, but haven't run into issues on other distros either. I use Vivaldi, but no issues noted with Firefox.

no prob! this is kind of embarrassing, but I'm not sure if that site is available outside of the US

Might need to use a VPN to access so may kind of skew my perception of how it performs, but I'll try to let everything load before i poke around it

Thanks, I appreciate it. The 400's built in browser was unusable and I never got around to trying Firefox on it. It didn't occur to me to try another OS distro. I just used Raspian (what the box came with) and I'll presumably keep doing so. But the 500's faster cpu, more ram, and SSD, should all help.

A reddit post I saw suggested Firefox was slowed down due to a ton of small disc writes to the SD card. Maybe it's better with the SSD.

In general it's fine but I can take a look at that for you. On one card I use fedora 43 (custom upstream cherry picks for out of tree hw) and on another, I use opensuse tumbleweed. I'll check in with both as part of tonights upgrades

This.... wasn't part of the OS until now?

Load LibreElec onto your Pi instead

1GB of RAM?!?!

They should just make a Pi Zero 3 with 1GB option

What they actually need is a price redesign

Certainly, then a Pi would be the logical choice. But for many projects, a regular system running Nodered and Firmata would do. The price of rPis is a little over the top these days for most projects.

True, there are loads of things that use libraries specific to the pi though. I have a couple of programs that use the wiring pi library that makes 0 sense to re-write for a different os.

You can do that on a $2 MCU with Firmata.

Can you run digital and analog I/O on a N100?

Or you could just buy an Intel N100 mini PC and have a more powerful machine with better storage and full size ports that is cheaper than buying all the adapters you need for a Pi