It's usually at least slightly more usable as long as you don't have too many tabs open.
I'd also recommend Firefox in general but that's neither here or there.
It would probably run fine with that amount of tabs also if it had 16 or maybe 8 GB, but not together with 2 or 3 IDE instancee, Teams, Slack and ome or more applications running in debug.
This stuff is not rocket science. It's not even performance gaming. We worked efficiently in 2013, and it still works today. All it takes is some memory and a halfway decent SSD.
Of course, a high school at that time might have purchased poverty-spec chromebooks with 4GB of RAM for understandable reasons of price.
So when samtheprogram talks about "devices from early to mid 2010's" that could mean a great many things.
This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.
A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.
(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)
That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.
Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.
And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.
Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.
16 GB would be about 8-16x what the system I'm describing had.
How are you blacklisting sites? Pihole/DNS, or something within Firefox itself?
But 4GB? Pass.
One solution is to use uBlock Origin, disable JS on most websites and whitelist it only for those which really need it.
Another is to use a textual web browser in the cloud, such as Carbonyl Terminal: https://github.com/niutech/carbonyl-terminal
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...
Keep js off by default and just whitest websites.
Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer.
And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.
Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things
Certainly the Nexus 7 (2012) had that problem (became completely unusably slow after a few years) and I am sure I have seen the same issue with other devices (Android phones and one iPad I had).
I was daily driving a 2009 MacBook Pro for a while in 2018. It was... fine, especially as a Vim user, but if someone else used my computer, they would most certainly comment or complain with normal web browsing.
We senselessly use RIAs for everything
I have several devices from early to mid 2010's, and the real reason these devices are annoying to unbearable to impossible to use (assuming Linux or Windows for security updates) is that they become very slow while just browsing the web or simply playing a video with a newer codec that has no hardware support on these older machines.
In my mind, this 10 years of updates is fantastic, but also not very practical towards the end of the support cycle. Better to have the option, though.