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The stock browser in Gingerbread 2.3.3 seems to take a lot of resources in terms of CPU and memory. This causes other apps, including the launcher, to be killed. Are there any steps I can take to reduce the footprint of the browser?

I have a Samsung Galaxy S (AT&T Captivate) running a ROM based on Gingerbread 2.3.3.

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One obvious solution is to use a third-party browser. – Al Everett Sep 12 '11 at 15:09
Most (all?) are worse, though. Did this happen to you with other ROMs? Are you using the stock launcher? – Matthew Read♦ Sep 12 '11 at 15:54
@Al, true, but there's a service I run that only work with the stock browser. Otherwise I'd consider Dolphin. Wasn't a fan of Firefox. – Chance Sep 12 '11 at 16:17
@Matthew, looking at the ROM page it says AOSP launcher. (serendipity7.weebly.com/index.html) Not sure what that is. It does seem to be worse with my Gingerbread ROM as opposed to my previous FroYo ROM. Both done by same people (Serendipity). – Chance Sep 12 '11 at 16:19
AOSP = Android Open-Source Project. In other words, it's the same launcher that would come with a Nexus device. It doesn't look like they've removed Samsung's Touchwiz from the ROM, so that might be one reason it gets killed so much -- the AOSP launcher is not the special-built-in-don't-kill-me launcher. Admittedly I'm not clear on how that works though. – Matthew Read♦ Sep 12 '11 at 16:26

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The only things I know of are turning off images, Javascript and plugins. You probably don't want to do all that but setting plugins to "On demand" is quite useful -- pages with Flash ads and such won't waste your data or battery in addition to demanding less from your phone, and it's just one click to allow a particular object to run if you want to watch an embedded video or something.

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Would clearing cache improve performance significantly? – Chance Oct 4 '11 at 2:42
@Chance I don't think so, that would force a fresh/complete download of every web page you visit which would just use more resources. – Matthew Read♦ Oct 4 '11 at 4:06
That's what I thought. My performance seems to be much better recently, and the things I can think of is that I deleted the Google search box widget from my home page, used OCLF and changed minfree to strict, and changed Googlesearch settings to not search text messages. I think the last thing improved Google app performance, but I don't know if it would affect browser. – Chance Oct 4 '11 at 12:45

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