Lightweight browsers for older Android smartphones

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It often happens that we receive questions about Which Browsers use and it's a topic we've covered really many times also with interesting comparative tables. However, the ones we generally recommend are: Browsers Chromium or based on Mozilla and in both cases we are therefore talking about Browsers which take up a lot of space and are generally designed mostly for modern smartphones. But which Browsers light to use on an older Android smartphone?

On Android there are basically three types of Browsers:

• those based on Chromium, they are real Browsers and they tend to be, to date, the safest of all. In this category among those suggested we mainly find Brave And Chromite;
• those that are based instead on Gecko and are therefore all derivatives of Mozilla Firefox. As we have already explained to this type of Browsers the “ is missingPer-Site Process Isolation” and, based on your Threat Model, it could therefore be a problem;
• finally there are those based on "WebView". These are not gods Browsers complete and although they also use them Chromium they are a sort of "light" version and do not have, for example, the "Per-Site Process Isolation“.

In this article we will talk about the latter. We generally recommend a Browsers true because it has more functions and also greater protection but we understand that on some very old smartphones some Browsers they may struggle to function.

Browsers lightweight for older Android smartphones

So we decided to take the Browsers suggested on DivestOS Browsers in the section WebView Browsers and we then did some tests, inspired by This article, to see which ones are the best performers.

Unfortunately we only had a Google Pixel 6 with GrapheneOS available, the ideal would have been to do a test with an old smartphone but, unfortunately, we don't have one on hand. All tests, except the Mozilla Kraken one, should be read as a higher number for better performance. That of Mozilla Kraken is the opposite, the lower the number the better.

As far as we have been able to observe The Browsers lightweight with greater performance is probably DuckDuckGo Privacy Browsers. We think there could be second position Privacy Browsers, the third FOSS Browsers and last Lightning.

Performance tests

The tests were performed with Mozilla Kraken 1.1, Basemark Web 3.0, Octane 2.0 And Speedometer 2.0.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser

Mozilla Kraken: 926.5ms +/- 2.2%
Basemark: 621.12
Octane: 45053
Speedometer: 132 +/- 9.9

Privacy Browser

Mozilla Kraken: 962.2ms +/- 1.5%
Basemark: 615.97
Octane: 45957
Speedometer: 135 +/- 8.5

FOSS Browser

Mozilla Kraken: 943.4ms +/- 1.6%
Basemark: 598.43
Octane: 42990
Speedometer: 134 +/- 9.8

Lightning

Mozilla Kraken: 1024.5ms +/- 2.5%
Basemark: 594.68
Octane: 43022
Speedometer: 135 +/- 9.8

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