Best Browser for Legacy PC

Which do you guys believe is the most 'resource-efficient' internet browser for a 'legacy' PC. It doesn't take much to bog-down my wife's PC - an early P3 with 256mb RAM (memory slots are full and I don't want to replace any hardware).

So in that regard would Opera, Firefox (or whatever) be a better choice than IE (which is now on her PC)?

 

either firefox or opera would be a better choice that IE in my opinion. as to how much less resources will be used I couldn't say exactly but it won't hurt to try them both, they will coexist just fine. They even get along with IE alright.

 

my first pick would be opera, but if u like firefox, keep very few extensions.

 

I would recommend Opera or K-Meleon.

Opera:

http://www.opera.com

K-Meleon:

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net

Both are very light and fast and will serve your legacy PC well. K-Meleon was designed to run on older machines.

 

I run Opera/FF on an OLD celeron with 256 RAM with no problems. FF uses about 30 mb of RAM, and Opera runs at about the same [maybe a little less].

 

Thanks for the feedback. K-Meleon would seem to be the best fit for my wife's PC. If it doesn't work out (hopefully it's as user-friendly as IE), I'll next try Opera.

 

Ok, I've installed K-Meleon on my wife's PC and it seems to be working much more responsively than IE6.

However, there are a few operational qwerks that I don't understand:

1. It doesn't seem to recognize the site logon cookies used with IE.

2. Right-clicking does not offer a 'Paste' function, so I need to teach my wife how to use Ctrl C & Ctrl V.

3. The font-sizes on the Home page (with no change in screen resolution) is smaller than with IE6!

There may also be additional operational peculiarities, that I have not yet encountered.

 

Why keep very few extensions? Do they contribute to heavy memory consumption or are extensions problamatic in other ways?