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As I've mentioned in the past, I often use a Raspberry Pi Model 3 for casual web surfing and email.
Recently Raspberrypi dot org introduced a newer version of Raspbian they call Pixel; it provides the Chromium web browser and a full LibreOffice suite.
Wow, two pigs in one small basket was my original thought.
Boy was I wrong. Chromium (even running uBlock Origin) was by far the fastest and most stable of the available browsers I've used on the Pi.
Midori, and "Web" (both webkit browsers), are slow and crashy by comparison.
Not so with Chromium. Its Blink engine really is very good on this hardware.
And LibreOffice also runs very well.
In fact, this Raspian (Raspberry Debian) release is just all around useable.
If you've got an extra flat screen, keyboard and mouse in your junk closet (or a spare hdmi port on your current monitor), its well worth the 35 bucks for a Pi model B Version 3. Its an astounding value and fun as well.
I bought extra MicroSD cards for playing with the other Operating System choices available from a variety of different sources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @05:00PM
Very interesting! Since the first thing there is "https://www.google.com/_/chrome/newtab?espv=2&ie=UTF-8", I have to ask: Did you set a custom new-tab page with an extension like this one [google.com]? (Obviously, I'm not happy that you have to load an extension to change the new-tab page -- this should be a user-facing setting, same as the home page (if you have the home button enabled) and start-up page options.)
If so, then it's loading the default new-tab page, then replacing it with your custom page, and that's a serious problem in its own right. And all the other requests to Google are probably unavoidable.
If not, then it renders everything else suspect -- there's no way to know which other requests to Google are only happening because you're loading the Google's new-tab page in the first place, and which ones are really inescapable. I'd be very interested to see the results if you install some such extension, point it at a non-google url (I'd use a file: url, but up to you), and try again.