I’ve found that my Pi 400’s built in web browser is almost unusable with bloaty script-heavy sites, so I’m wondering if the Pi 5 or 500+ is any better. There would be an NVMe SSD present if that helps.
If someone has this setup, could they take a look at homedepot.com ? That’s a very slow and obnoxious site that I use sometimes, as I do buy some from there when I can’t avoid it. I’m ok if it’s a bit sluggish but my Pi 400 was near incapable of navitation or loading the page in a reasonable amount of waiting.
Thanks!
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Night and day difference Pi 4 vs Pi 5. Pages on Pi 5 load almost instantly, scrolling is not always smooth in Firefox. Video playback still sucks though, watching Youtube in 1080@30 VP9 draws more power than prime95.
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.
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.
- Use LibreWolf instead of FireFox,
Not for me (4GB Pi5). I watch a lot of full screen video and Firefox just can’t handle it at all even if it’s the only application running and with only one tab. I tried all the “fixes”. In the end I gave up, tried a few, and settled on Brave, which still gets a bit confused coming out of full screen which “F11 F11 restart” fixes.
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.
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.
It did load homedepot.com when I tried it just now, but I don’t have a mouse or keyboard attached, and the monitor isn’t touchscreen, so I have no idea how it performs when scrolling. Probably terribly.
IIRC, mine is an earlier version of this one: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus/. It has 1GB of RAM, and a 64GB sdcard (which is honestly bigger than it needs), with basic Debian Bookworm installed. It runs essentially nothing except sshd, xwindows, and Openbox configured with the following autostart script:
xset -dpms xset s off unclutter -display 0:0 -noevents -grab export DISPLAY=:0 && firefox-esr --kiosk $URL_TO_VISIT &> /dev/null & disown &> /dev/nullWhere
$URL_TO_VISITis a panel on my local Home Assistant.Granted, it’s not exactly doing much other than showing a single page all the time, and sometimes it does freeze and require a manual restart every few weeks (hence why I said it’s only “running okay”). It does work though, and I expect that an rPi 5 would be a good experience for actual browsing, especially if you used one of the 4GB or higher versions.
If you aren’t already, I recommend running a blocker like adguard on your network. Aside from making the internet more pleasant to look at overall, it might help with making sites more responsive.
Thanks, yeah, I’ve been using Ublock Origin plus some local DNS blackholing when browsing on my laptop, and will do the same on a pi if I use one.
Maybe I’ll now see if I can figure out if something is misconfigured on my 400, instead of buying a 5 or 500. I have some FOMO because of expected further increases in ram and ssd prices, but meh.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Works fine on my pi 500, not the fastest thing in the world but perfectly usable
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
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.
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
Lol oops, thanks.
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.
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 ;).
Remember to check of you are using hardware acceleration.
