Will This Speed up Your Raspberry Pi Browsing by up to 1200%?

Puffin Web Browser
(Image credit: CloudMosa)

One of the inevitable consequences of the pandemic is that schools and educational facilities have closed their doors to keep students safe. There has been a shift towards distance learning via video and e-learning platforms. Puffin Cloud Learning, a Raspberry Pi OS based operating system from CloudMosa is looking to speed up your e-learning with the Raspberry Pi. In a bold claim on their website “Browser benchmarks suggest Puffin is 1,200% faster than Chrome on Raspberry Pi.”

Puffin Web Browser

(Image credit: CloudMosa)

Puffin manages these incredible speeds because the content is rendered remotely on their encrypted cloud servers. A JavaScript engine is used to pre-process and compress web pages before they arrive at your screen. This can be interpreted as a proxy server by some sites, and may affect the content that is available to you. 

Puffin Cloud Learning is claimed to be “300% faster than Chrome OS devices costing 300% more” and a Raspberry Pi is seen to be a cost effective solution for schools. “Raspberry Pi seems to be the best, if not the only, financially viable solution for many schools. For the cost of a $350 PC, the school can have 10 bare-bone Raspberry Pi.”

Puffin Web Browser

(Image credit: CloudMosa)

We installed the Puffin Internet Terminal, the same browser that powers Puffin Cloud Learning on a Raspberry Pi 4 and in a speed test, loading the Tom’s Hardware site, we didn’t see a massive difference in speed. Puffin Internet Terminal was slightly faster at rendering the page but nowhere near the 1200% benchmarks suggest. That being said, every second counts and the browser feels responsive for general use.

As spotted by leepspvideo, Puffin Cloud Learning / Puffin Internet Terminal is an interesting solution to speeding up your browsing.

Les Pounder

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

  • Giroro
    I can't help but notice that the Puffin version of ebay has an extra ad in it. What else are they planning on doing with the children's data on top of the extra monitization?
    Reply
  • neojack
    if i remember well, opera also has a feature to render the page on their servers to speed up navigation. on their mobile app i think.

    it would be worthwhile to compare the two solutions
    Reply
  • gsholling
    So where are the cookies and SSH endpoints? In a secure communication between your computer and a server (let's say your bank for example), who is it that has the other end of the SSL link? I'm assuming since the page in rendered on a server then it must be the server that has the other end of the SSL link...

    i.e. you are providing passwords and usernames to a remote computer to send to your bank for you. Anyone think this is a man-in-the-middle security flaw!
    Reply
  • passivecool
    @gsholling: I don't think students are intended to do online banking from school computers...
    feel free to read the article throughly before hyperventilating.
    Reply