In general it's fine but I can take a look at that for you. On one card I use fedora 43 (custom upstream cherry picks for out of tree hw) and on another, I use opensuse tumbleweed. I'll check in with both as part of tonights upgrades
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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Raspberry Pi
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Thanks, I appreciate it. The 400's built in browser was unusable and I never got around to trying Firefox on it. It didn't occur to me to try another OS distro. I just used Raspian (what the box came with) and I'll presumably keep doing so. But the 500's faster cpu, more ram, and SSD, should all help.
A reddit post I saw suggested Firefox was slowed down due to a ton of small disc writes to the SD card. Maybe it's better with the SSD.
no prob! this is kind of embarrassing, but I'm not sure if that site is available outside of the US
Might need to use a VPN to access so may kind of skew my perception of how it performs, but I'll try to let everything load before i poke around it
Lol oops, thanks.
I'm really sorry, but I'm unable to get through to this website on the Pi 5 using ProtonVPN. I'm still getting that access denied dialog.
I'm able to get through on my work system via the corp VPN, I'm not sure why. I can see what you mean though, that website is awful even on an over-provisioned workstation.
I don't suppose you have a similar site to test against? if it's any consolation, I'm able to load up and navigate absolutely bullshit websites (in terms of bloat and performance) like ali express just fine.
Ah, oh well, thanks for the effort with homedepot. Yeah all sites on the 400 were bad, but homedepot was especially bad. I guess aliexpress is also pretty bad so if you can view that, it's a good sign ;).
I've had zero issues with Firefox on either my pi 5, or Pi 500+.
I'm running KDE plasma, but haven't run into issues on other distros either. I use Vivaldi, but no issues noted with Firefox.
That's good to hear, thanks. I wonder why the pi 4 is so bad. It's much worse than my lower-midrange mobile phone, for example.
They're my first raspberry pi devices. I'm wondering if the 64 bit architecture of the 5, vs the 32 bit of the 4 would be a big factor.
The pi 4 and pi 5 both have 64 bit cpu architecture, though it's sort of possible that the 400 has a 32 bit OS (I just used the default one). Maybe I'll check into it and see if I can run an OS that I'm sure is 64 bit. Thanks!
I'd find it odd if a RPi4 can't smoothly run a browser :o
You can use btop, to monitor if you have a bottleneck on your CPU or RAM, if Swap memory gets used, things will slow down, if your CPU is clocking @ 100%, same thing but not much you can do about that besides perhaps weeding out unnessecary processes that consume a lot, if there are any.
In case your RAM is @ 100%, you could:
- Use LibreWolf instead of FireFox,
it's an open source privacy focussed fork,
which removes some of the FireFox bloaty stuff, which reduces RAM usage. - Use uBlock Origin, to block advertisements, which will reduce RAM usage and increase page load speeds
- Use NoScript, to block JavaScript trackers, to further reduce RAM usage and increase page load speedd, beware, will block all JS by default, so sites will break, but can be manually fixed by re-enabling only the nessecary JS components on a site
- Switch to DietPi, a very light weight RAM/CPU friendly distro for SBCs like RPis, I've used it only headless (without GUI) but it only used 50Mb of RAM out of the box last time I monitorred it, which is impressively low.
Yeah, I have had firefox-esr running okay for years now on an ancient rPi 3 as a Home Assistant panel. I expect an rPi 5 would be able to run Firefox just fine.
If you're in the US, can you homedepot.com on your pi 3? How much ram does it have? That was interesting to hear. Thanks.
It did load homedepot.com when I tried it just now, but I don't have a mouse or keyboard attached, and the monitor isn't touchscreen, so I have no idea how it performs when scrolling. Probably terribly.
IIRC, mine is an earlier version of this one: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus/. It has 1GB of RAM, and a 64GB sdcard (which is honestly bigger than it needs), with basic Debian Bookworm installed. It runs essentially nothing except sshd, xwindows, and Openbox configured with the following autostart script:
xset -dpms
xset s off
unclutter -display 0:0 -noevents -grab
export DISPLAY=:0 && firefox-esr --kiosk $URL_TO_VISIT &> /dev/null & disown &> /dev/null
Where $URL_TO_VISIT is a panel on my local Home Assistant.
Granted, it's not exactly doing much other than showing a single page all the time, and sometimes it does freeze and require a manual restart every few weeks (hence why I said it's only "running okay"). It does work though, and I expect that an rPi 5 would be a good experience for actual browsing, especially if you used one of the 4GB or higher versions.
If you aren't already, I recommend running a blocker like adguard on your network. Aside from making the internet more pleasant to look at overall, it might help with making sites more responsive.
Thanks, yeah, I've been using Ublock Origin plus some local DNS blackholing when browsing on my laptop, and will do the same on a pi if I use one.
Maybe I'll now see if I can figure out if something is misconfigured on my 400, instead of buying a 5 or 500. I have some FOMO because of expected further increases in ram and ssd prices, but meh.
Works fine on my pi 500, not the fastest thing in the world but perfectly usable
Remember to check of you are using hardware acceleration.
Not for me (4GB Pi5). I watch a lot of full screen video and Firefox just can't handle it at all even if it's the only application running and with only one tab. I tried all the "fixes". In the end I gave up, tried a few, and settled on Brave, which still gets a bit confused coming out of full screen which "F11 F11 restart" fixes.
Night and day difference Pi 4 vs Pi 5. Pages on Pi 5 load almost instantly, scrolling is not always smooth in Firefox. Video playback still sucks though, watching Youtube in 1080@30 VP9 draws more power than prime95.