firefox memory warning on rpi zero 2w

[beavis69]

Hello,

On rpi zero 2w, firefox shows a modal box every time at start with this message "It is not recommended to run Firefox on devices with less than 1GB of RAM."

With chromium i was able to disable it with --no-memcheck but with firefox it seems there is no option to disable it.

So i have tried another lightweight browser midori

So i replaced my webbrowserkiosk.sh with:

#!/bin/bash
#
#  Open Rowing Monitor, https://github.com/JaapvanEkris/openrowingmonitor
#
#  Runs the Web Frontend in a Firefox browser in fullscreen kiosk mode
#
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms
unclutter &
matchbox-window-manager &
# Start Midori in fullscreen mode
midori --display=:0 -e Fullscreen -e Navigationbar -a http://127.0.0.1/?mode=kiosk &
sleep 10
# send F11 to midori to remove the window-bar
xdotool key F11
sleep 365d

• https://astian.org/midori-browser/
• https://github.com/goastian/midori-desktop

I also replaced openbox with matchbox as matchbox will not try to open menu and printer config stuff (so less warnings in journalctl).

Give it a try, it really use less cpu and much less ram than firefox and chromium.

Hope that helps.

Beavis

[JaapvanEkris]

On rpi zero 2w, firefox shows a modal box every time at start with this message "It is not recommended to run Firefox on devices with less than 1GB of RAM."

With chromium i was able to disable it with --no-memcheck but with firefox it seems there is no option to disable it.

Thanks for thinking along.

• https://astian.org/midori-browser/
• https://github.com/goastian/midori-desktop

I also replaced openbox with matchbox as matchbox will not try to open menu and printer config stuff (so less warnings in journalctl).

Give it a try, it really use less cpu and much less ram than firefox and chromium.

I will, bit how to install it? I tried 'sudo apt-get install midori' on the 64bit bookworm versiob, but the package isn't known. Any tips here?

[beavis69]

got mine from raspbian repo:

root@rower:~# dpkg --print-architecture
armhf
root@rower:~# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bookworm main contrib non-free rpi
# Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bullseye main contrib non-free rpi
root@rower:~# apt search midori
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
midori/stable,now 7.0-2.1 armhf [installed]
  fast, lightweight graphical web browser

Seems it was removed from debian after bullseyes, but debs are available here : https://astian.org/midori-browser/linux/

[JaapvanEkris]

The version from apt-get on Bullseye is quite old, I installed it via

wget https://github.com/goastian/midori-desktop/releases/download/v11.5.2/midori_11.5.2-1_arm64.deb
sudo apt-get install ./midori_11.5.2-1_arm64.deb

This version is maintained by Astian. They did totally revamp the CLI-commands, so a working /opt/openrowingmonitor/install/webbrowserkiosk.sh is

#!/bin/bash
#
#  Open Rowing Monitor, https://github.com/JaapvanEkris/openrowingmonitor
#
#  Runs the Web Frontend in a Midori browser in fullscreen kiosk mode
#
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms
unclutter &
matchbox-window-manager &
# Start Midori in fullscreen mode
midori --kiosk --kiosk-monitor 0 --disable-pinch --new-window http://127.0.0.1/?mode=kiosk

CPU load and memory usage stay nice low, unless you use the force curve on the GUI (this is where all browsers suffer, so we got some work to do here).

Only issue I have is that my setup always shows a "Rebuild has been completed" message in the bottom of my screen, which is extremely annoying. It might originate from the settings I have changed earlier on, but I haven't found a way to reset these (Astian also changed that, so I'm completely lost here as all help on the internet points to the old way of doing things).

Could you give this version a spin and see what happens?

An alternative might be Epiphany browser (A.k
a. GNOME Web, see https://github.com/elalemanyo/raspberry-pi-kiosk-screen

[beavis69]

Actually 7.0-2.1 was from bookworm/raspbian (but seems to only exists with armhf 32bit arch).

Really small memory footprint:

root@rower:~# free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           426Mi       239Mi        25Mi       5,0Mi       217Mi       186Mi
Swap:          1,0Gi        73Mi       950Mi

I'll try a more recent version and epiphany and check memory usage and let you know.

[JaapvanEkris]

I've tried to get rid of several issues with Midori, and they now place an address bar on top of our new navigation bar, which is messy and actually blocks usage of many settings.

I have made Chromium standard again. The new startup script has a large set of options essentially turning off anything that is optional, which hopefully will work in a Pi Zero 2W. It hovers around 8% CPU on a Pi4, which is pretty decent. If Chromium isn't installed, it will still try to start Firefox.