Firefox with Ublock Origin is pretty much the gold standard. But, it likely won't do terribly better. Modern webpages are big.

You need to either Linux to get the OS RAM usage down or get another 4gb in there. Both would help a ton.

If you’re open to putting a new OS on, there’s Linux Lite and it’s quite nice. It comes with Firefox.

Minimum Requirements:

• 1.5 Ghz Dual Core Processor
• 4GB Memory
• 40GB HDD/SSD/NVME
• VGA, DVI, DP or HDMI screen capable of 1366x768 resolution
• DVD drive or USB port for the ISO image
• Disable Secure Boot

Maybe something intended for weak hardware and older versions of Windows:

https://github.com/win32ss/supermium

A Linux install with something lightweight like XFCE for desktop environment would do better probably.

I also run a very low end machine with 4GB ram.

The issue often isn’t the browser or even the website, exactly, it’s the tons and tons of advertising and tracking crap that is in the background of most sites nowadays.

The way around that is to run a solid ad blocker. uBlock Orgin is the best, but Google (and maybe MS? I don’t use windows) has fucked over plugins to specifically make things like it not work.

So, what you want to do is run Firefox with uBlock Origin with the more aggressive blocking settings in both uBlock and Firefox. Extra credit for setting up PiHole to block a different set of crap.

The one thing is that this will absolutely break certain sites. But fuck those sites, they’re fucking you.

File browser

Firefox with ublock origin

100% agree that you'll have far better performance with a light Linux distro. If you're having trouble running a browser, that's 5% of what's running with some bloated OS chugging along just to show you a desktop.

I went through same scenario a few years ago. At the time, I used Firefox with uBlock origin. Brave is chromium based, so don't expect lower RAM usage from it.

If you're using Linux, look into zram and zswap. The first one gave a second wind to my notebook back then.

Waterfox.

I've tried a half dozen common ones - Falkon is described as lightweight. I use it sometimes.

Firefox is totally doable on that much RAM. Not going to be pleasant, but usable. You want to strip down as much resource usage as you can: inside Firefox throw in uBlock Origin and Tab Unloader; outside Firefox use a stripped down desktop like XFCE or just a straight low resource window manager with no desktop environment (I was a big fan of WindowMaker back in the day).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_(web_browser)

seamonkey, but compat with many modern websites aren't good

falkon might kinda work

people here probably hates this but if you're on m$ windows, mypal68 and 360chrome(modded version) kinda works well on potato machines. i used to use 360chrome v86 on a atom z8350 with 2gb ram running win10 x32

I’m not going to sugar coat it but your ask might be a bit hard if you want a relatively clean browsing experience.

You’ll need a browser that can at the very least use addons for ad blocking / script blocking / browser and OS spoofing.

But if you are on Linux then the lowest resource browser will always be via the terminal but then you miss things like layout etc… :)

links?

A long time ago, I used Midori (the pre-2019 version), I remember it was the only browser that ran streaming video without issues. The browser itself is a bit flaky though.