Need a lightweight modern browser for Win XP

I'm running a Windows VM under Linux host for using software on both at the same time. With a laptop that has only 8GB RAM and number crunching apps eating RAM on the host, my poor VM has to make do with 1GB, maybe even 0.5GB if I really want to push it. After some unpleasant experience with Win 7 as the guest I decided to go with good old Win XP instead. I know it's EoS but there's no important data going through the VM, so whatever.

One problem I have is sometimes it's more convenient to use a browser directly inside the VM for certain operations. XP has IE8, which is reasonably lightweight but terrible at rendering modern websites. IE9+ can't run, and other common modern browsers like FF or Chrome require way too much RAM. What options do I have?

By "lightweight" I mean low RAM usage. CPU load shouldn't be a problem. The browser should have basic support for JS and HTML5 stuff.

 

You could try out Palemoon (xp build)

http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-atom.shtml

@Tinderbox (UK) posted about this, and I tried it out on my atom tablet. It feels modern and snappy.

You might also try out Midori browser, which a lot of the lightweight Linux distros use.

 

Thanks.

Gave Pale Moon a quick run and it appears to be promising. I'll test it further.


I do use Midori on the Linux side. Unfortunately it crashes all the time under XP for me.

 

1GB RAM is plenty for the latest FireFox. Don't forget you can increase it to 4GB with virtual memory.

 

It's enough for running, but once tab count goes up it eats RAM really fast. I've also found FF causing abnormally high CPU load on both Windows and Linux recently.


Update on Palemoon:
The browser runs nicely. I end up keeping it in the VM and replacing Midori with it under Linux as well.


Update 2:
XP version is working reasonably well at the moment. Linux version is giving me memory leaks.


Update 3:
XP support is no longer available on Palemoon. The last XP build was version 26.4.