The problem I had was they ran reasonably well (with tempered expectations) until you opened that one more tab that triggered swapping hell and then the machine would stall for an extended time. Could ssh in and kill the browser, wait it out, or cycle the power.Obviously if you open up loads of tabs; it will eventually grind to a halt; But I do use Chromium and Firefox on several Pi3s (1GB versions) with quite acceptable results. Obviously it isn't as fast as a Pi5 or a fast intel/AMD machine...but it IS use-able. It actually runs far better than some ancient wintel Laptops (even with Linux) that I have lounging in a cupboard because I'm too much of a hoarder to bin them.For some value of ok.... It is easy to have a 3B+ running from an SD card, with the default settings, descend into swapping hell if you open up more than a couple tabs in Chromium. This is almost guaranteed if you don't up the amount of swap available. A 3B+ running from an SSD with a reasonable amount of swap is not bad, as long as you temper your expectations to the cost of the machine.
Expecting a current full functioned browser to run on a Model B with 512 MB is not a realistic expectation. That is a sad statement, but modern browsers are incredible memory hogs.
I fully acknowledge that being more frugal with number of tabs can avoid this issue, but that does not fit with my workflows. Even my more ancient laptops had 2 GB of Ram which make a significant difference. It is annoying that the world has become so browser centric, and that they are so memory hungry.
With the workarounds (increased swap, faster media) it was much less of an issue. A 4GB 4B resolved the issues and a 8GB 5 is a pleasure to use.
Statistics: Posted by bjtheone — Tue Jul 09, 2024 11:51 am