Raspberry PI Zero W only as webpage viewer

Question

I am building a 3D printer, and the display is managed by a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The only purpose of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, is to load the control webpage for "Duet Web control." In my case, the address is 192.168.0.36. I did that by installing the Raspberry Pi OS (32 bit) with Debian. When the boot process ends, a script executes that starts Midori (a web browser), goes to fullscreen, and loads the webpage. The problem is that the Pi Zero W is so underpowered that the webpage never loads.

• 0.00 : Power on
• 1:14 : Cursor appears
• 1:50 : Desktop fully loaded
• 1:51 : Midori starts loading webpage
• 3:57 : midori only shows a white screen with no loading bar

Is there any OS designed only to view a webpage? can i uninstall the DE bout maintain the browser in a gui version?

Answer 1

I recently did something fairly similiar - I used a Pi Zero 2W to drive a touchscreen monitor, where I spin up Chrome to show a web page (in my case served locally on the device), which then communicates over a GPIO-based serial interface.

I found that if I installed the recommended Desktop OS, the UI was really laggy, and the Pi would occasionally 'freeze'.

I finally realized that I could install the "Lite" version of the Raspberry Pi OS, and then just install the X-Windows system (not the whole desktop), and Chrome.

Then, if I remember correctly, I ran 'startx' from the default user's bash.rc and configured the user's .xinitrc to run Chrome in kiosk mode.

This worked great, no perceptible lag.

I don't have the exact steps in front of me right now, but if you can't figure it out, let me know here, and I'll post it.