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Web browsing on the raspberry pi 3 has become rather dreadful with a later version of raspbian. I am running raspbian on a Samsung EVO+ (which is supposedly faster than most SD cards..). I don't remember it being this bad before.. perhaps the complexity of websites have increased lately, or chromium has just become more heavy. It seems to be that the slowness isn't due to the CPU, but mostly from disk access which is the biggest bottleneck on any raspberry pi.

Most of the answers I've seen on this site are for older versions of raspbian which had midori or other web browsers. The latest raspbian has switched to chromium however.

Are there any things I can do to improve web browsing performance? Does it make sense to switch to another web browser?

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  • Strange as it sounds - if you are using the SSD and Ethernet try a WiFi connection as it removes USB the bottleneck. I've used Epiphany, Midori and Firefox on a 3B but went back to my Mac TBH.
    – user115418
    Commented Apr 12, 2020 at 10:00
  • 2
    Buy a RPi4B 4GB. Simpler than mucking about with your old RPi3B (which doesn't have enough RAM for a bloated browser).
    – Dougie
    Commented Apr 12, 2020 at 10:30

1 Answer 1

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The Pi 4 is a gigantic step up on video playback smoothness. But a 3B ought to be enough for causal web-browsing.

Things to try:

  • Overclocking
  • Set GPU memory to 128 MB.

  • Enabling FKMS (see below) To enable Fake KMS:

    1. Open a terminal.
    2. Type sudo raspi-config and press Enter.
    3. Press down arrow key until Advanced Options is selected, then press Enter.
    4. Navigate to GL Driver, and press Enter.
    5. Navigate to GL (Fake KMS), and press Enter.
    6. There you go!
    7. Exit raspi-config, and while you're doing so, it should prompt you to reboot.

After making those above changes, my Pi3 played YouTube smoothly, loaded Facebook, outlook.com, and other heavily-bloated websites.

Hope that helps.

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  • Some questions: why 128MB and not 256? Also, why Fake KMS and not Full KMS?
    – 9a3eedi
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 6:48
  • Great questions! You can try 256MB if you want, but I've never heard of anyone having to go that far to fix a problem. Besides, it leaves less RAM for the CPU.
    – Botspot
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 12:32
  • Fake KMS is preferable, and more stable according to this RPi engineer.
    – Botspot
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 12:34

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