Last Updated on March 24, 2022
Summary
Speed and privacy are two of the biggest considerations that will guide you when you’re choosing a browser; some demand more of your system resources while others are relatively lightweight.
In my opinion, Chrome offers the best web surfing experience on the AK41. I’ve tested Chrome on a fair few mini PCs, and often I’ve been fairly unimpressed with the experience. Things start out OK, but usually problems surface. But over the 6 week testing period, I’ve concluded that the AK41 offers what I need — a healthy chunk of RAM, a sufficiently powerful processor, and excellent disk speed.
I was more than impressed with the performance of Firefox on the AK41. And that’s important because, unlike Chrome, it’s open source software.
Why Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi?
You might be asking why I’ve confined my investigation to 4 web browsers. Basically, the selection chose itself. Most visitors to LinuxLinks use either Chrome (about 56%) or Firefox (about 31%). Firefox usage is lower for users who don’t use Linux.
The next most popular web browsers viewing LinuxLinks are Safari, Opera, and Edge. I couldn’t cover Safari, the default browser on Apple devices, as it’s not available for Linux. Edge is a web browser developed by Microsoft. While it’s been touted for ages that a Linux port will be published based on Chromium, Microsoft has not given a planned release date for Microsoft Edge on Linux.
While Vivaldi has a really tiny market share, I grew rather fond of it, as it’s only one of a few graphical web browsers that work well on the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. But it just doesn’t have polish, feel, or extensibility of Chrome and Firefox.
Obviously there’s lots of other web browsers available for Linux, but almost all of them have negligible market share.
Page 1 – Introduction / Memory Usage / General Web Browsing / Email
Page 2 – Video
Page 3 – Benchmarks
Page 4 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| AWOW AK41 Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 11 | Video consoles: SNES emulation |
| Week 10 | Running TeamViewer with AWOW AK41 as the host |
| Week 9 | Astronomy on the AK41 including Celestia, Stellarium, Skychart, and more |
| Week 8 | Recording video with OBS Studio |
| Week 7 | Home computer emulators: FS-UAE, ZEsaurUX, Hatari, Clock Signal |
| Week 6 | Web browsing with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi |
| Week 5 | Gaming: SuperTuxKart, AwesomeNauts, Retrocycles, Robocraft, DOTA 2, and more |
| Week 4 | Run multiple operating systems on the AK41 |
| Week 3 | Video and audio playback looking at hardware acceleration |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the AK41 with 3 other low power machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC.