OT: browsing painfully slow on old Android

[Tenaja]

This is OT, and I'm wondering if any of you have noticed this. I've got a pixel phone (from 2016) which is slower than recent phones, but only mildly slower than when new--probably from the new versions of Android.

But my Fire tablet and Nexus 7, from similar eras (gifts) have not been updated similarly, and also perform nearly unusably slow. They are nowhere near as fast as when new, and the batteries are not worn out. Some sites take half a minute or longer to load, and they sometimes freeze up for 10 to 15 seconds at a time. I've even done factory resets, to no avail.

I don't visit questionable sites, mostly news & tech sites.

So are web sites that much more bloated than 4 to 5 years ago? Or do the Android bugfixes drag them down that much?

Thanks

[the.weavster]

Have you tried installing a third-party browser like Firefox to see if that makes a difference?

I have a rather old Chinese Android tablet (Ployer MoMo) and I haven't noticed any real slow down but I always use Firefox not Chrome.

[Tenaja]

Yes I have.

I was wondering if the browser has gotten optimized for four or more cores, and the cheap ones probably only have two. But the nexus7 had a quad core 1.5ghz Snapdragon 600.

So maybe only 2gb ram, but my pi-like SBC has similar specs and isn't quite as slow.

[yoxola]

Newer Chrome are utilizing multi-core and multi-threaded to achieve good performance in new devices, hence running very poor on old hardwares. And when moving to 64bit, Chrome use double size of memory browsing a page compared to 32bit ones. And browsing use more bettery juice than before on my Smasung phones, and for worse, many apps using Chromium based solution, are battery hogger.

But not all hopes are lost, Flashing some 3rd party release may improve the performance as they comes with some tweak to let the browser running better, but taking the risk of bricking the phone.

[Joakim Christiansen]

I had this problem with both Chrome and Firefox on my "old" Android phone. Downloaded Kiwi Browser and noticed a big improvement!

[Derren]

So are web sites that much more bloated than 4 to 5 years ago?

Yes.
Also I suspect Android updates are partially slowing down devices (I feel like the pictures of my Samsung Galaxy S8 are now much worse than 2 years ago), in order to push the sale of new products. But you said some of your devices didn't receive any updates.

But it's the same with any computer. Software that ran fine on my old laptop 10 years ago, does not run fine anymore. Not sure if RAM and CPU are "losing cells" over time or what the issue is.

[Tenaja]

For the 662 people and bots interested in this, I hard-reset the tablet again, and without updating it, it was back to "normal speeds". I updated the OS, and speeds remained. However, after updating Chrome, the tablet became nearly unusable.

Apparently, Chrome has become so bloated that it demands more than those old processors can handle. Unfortunately, it seems like all of the standard browsers are based on Chrome...

[skywalk]

This just happened to me and my original Pixel phone. It has 1 hour battery life since Android 10 updates. The bloat on Chrome and every other app accessing location and contacts and blah blah, has become too much for a 4 year old phone with a new battery. Time for a new phone.

[Mijikai]

Only updated to the newest samsung because of wear and some software that started to have issues on my 7yr old phone.
Browsing on my old android is just as fast as on my new smartphone (not using chrome).