Subj : Re: Supermium To : August Abolins From : Ky Moffet Date : Sun Sep 14 2025 15:04:00 AUGUST ABOLINS wrote: > Hello Ky.Moffet! > > ** On Saturday 13.09.25 - 08:15, Ky.Moffet wrote to Mike Powell: > >> It will occasionally silently crash, and it does not properly >> "restore pages" when you restart it. Small price to have a >> browser that works on any Windows I want. That is the only >> drawback I've come across, and I've been using it for >> everyday since March 2024, when I first encountered it. I >> have never seen it make Windows unstable, and I have it >> running all the time. > > It has silently closed here (XP) several times. But, before > that happens, my system (MemInfo 3.43) reports "Low memory". Not my problem here, Silver has 64GB RAM. What gets the silent crash is too much javascript all at once doing too much in the background (opened several pages and one was a js-infested mess, that sort of thing). But on 32bit XP, even with the default max supported 4GB of system RAM, you really only have 3GB to work with (one GB is not really available), and for any modern browser, that's nowhere near enough. The surprising thing is how well Supermium works under such constrained conditions -- my Win11 netbook (4GB RAM) usually has only about 500mb free, often not that, and Supermium still runs (on the rare occasions I need a browser on the netbook). It's a lot more like Edge than Chrome (Edge is just Chrome skinned by Microsoft), as Edge will also run better than Chrome under such reduced circumstances. But Edge is endlessly annoying, so I prefer not to use it at all. I've never seen Supermium get above about 8GB used, but I've seen Chrome gobble up 40GB or more. > One of the latest crashes/closures did something to prevent me > from putting my XP to Sleep. Had to do a hard shutdown [hold > power button until powers off] :( Open up Task Manager, sort by name, close anything named chrome.exe The last one or two will refuse to close, but once everything else has been forcibly closed, after a few minutes the rest will close on their own, or will finally let you close them. (This happens with all browsers, now and then, I'm not sure why. SeaMonkey does it too and they're no relation at all.) Also, in settings under "System: make sure "Continue running background apps when Supermium is closed" is disabled. At a very wild guess, disabling "hardware acceleration" might help -- Chrome might have hold of the graphics driver that way and can't turn loose. >> I get the ZIP version and when I bother upgrading, I install >> it next to the previous version. It is smart enough to pick >> up on all the settings and extensions even tho it's not in >> the same location. > > Good to know. I just let it pick the default c:\Program Files > location for the first install. I never use the default location if I can avoid it. I want stuff sorted out where I can find it. >> and I've used them for several years, but they're not as >> complete and compatible as Supermium. And Supermium (like >> Chrome which is really what it is) also renders pages a lot >> faster than anything in the Mozilla family. > > Indeed.. I think page renderings to seem faster. But I thought > that was because it was still a fresh install and not much is > queued up in temp/history/cache files. > Nope, it's just a much better rendering engine. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/websites-apps/rendering-engines-used-by-different-web-browsers/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines Blink is derived from Webkit, which was derived from KHTML, the browser engine in KDE's Konqueror. Gecko goes back to Netscape 4, which had a horrible rendering engine -- really noticeable after Netscape 3, which was blazing fast (but that codebase was discarded as "not complliant with modern standards" and has since been lost). Goanna is a fork that is considerably faster. but not used much. Ladybird is building its own and so far I haven't looked at it. þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com (454:1/1) .