If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.
As of a couple of years ago, I was using a mid-naughts iMac with Linux installed for a number of projects. It was fine for basic scripting, data analysis, and shell-based Web access.
A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.
(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)
That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.
Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.
And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.
Interesting. I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 10+ year old thinkbook with 16G in it (they were only sold with 8 at the time but replacing the two 4G modules with 8G modules worked, 16G does not seem to work).
Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.
modern browsers don't really keep hundreds of tabs open, they just keep a place holder and then return the memory back to the system as resources get low. I'm not sure why people think a browser can keep 100s of webpages open when modern webpages (tabs) often use 100MB->1GB of memory.
1 or 2 GB of RAM? Yeah, that would've been the problem. Old CPUs can handle more than people think but there's absolutely no getting away from modern memory demands.
Yeah. 8GB of ram is pretty much the minimum usable amount these days. If you can get 8GB into an older machine (with an SSD), then it should work fine.
Yeah something that old is gonna be heavily memory restricted, javascript chews through memory like nobody's business, then you start swapping and it's game over.
Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance.
This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.
