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 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.”
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.
