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I have been experimenting with browsers using Puppy LiveCD (which supports 
lucent modems, amazingly).

It comes with Seamonkey 1.1.15 (GTK2) and you can download Firefox 2 (I 
did not bother), Skipstone (Mozilla based - uses the Mozilla libraries 
already present in Seamonkey) and Netsurf.

Skipstone is an additional 181K and Netsurf about 400K download.

These are all GTK2 builds.  Netsurf requires GTK2.  (Pango cairo...).


Loading home page (I have 768M RAM):

Seamonkey - uses 15% of RAM (Google)
Skipstone - uses 10%
Netsurf - uses 3%

Browsing to a music school page which OPera displays badly:

Seamonkey - 9% of RAM and displays it nicely, in 5 seconds
Skipstone - 7% of RAM, displayed without images, in 16 seconds
Netsurf - 3% of RAM, displayed all the text in 4 sec, added images
abruptly at the end of 12 seconds

Another university page (www.umich.edu)
Netsurf requires typing the www and edu/org/com for everything.

Seamonkey - 9% of RAM, 5 sec for text, 11 sec for everything
Skipstone - 9% of RAM, " " " "
Netsurf - 4% of RAM, 3 sec for text, 15 sec for everything


Seamonkey lets you browse without images.  The others do not,
but since Netsurf displays the text first anyway, and does it faster
than Seamonkey, it does not matter.

Netsurf has options to block ads and popups and animated gifs.
Skipstone has few options, it displays ONLY full-page, you cannot
access the menus via keyboard.  It claims to be fast.

How much RAM does Firefox 1.5 use?  Netsurf about 22MB despite
the horrendous list of dependencies.  Sometimes the newer libraries
actually save memory and run faster.

Netsurf did not display one of the pages quite right, but it did a lot
better than Skipstone.  I don't know how it blocks ads - I did not
try it at an ad-sponsored site yet.  It has far fewer options than
Firefox or Seamonkey.

It does not appear to use Mozilla code.  You have to aquire all sorts
of extra libraries to compile it with, in addition to GTK2 (cairo,
pango, glade) - rsvg curl xml parser hubbub nsgif css haru (PDF)
or disable some of the features that they support.  (Who needs to
view icons or bmps?).

Puppy does not work well with my 84-key keyboard - excuse typos.
Up arrow is unusable.

There are a few precompiled versions including the one in Puppy.
I can try to copy over all the dependencies to BL along with the
program files, or maybe Steven or someone wants to try compiling
it.   GTK1 browsers are no longer being updated and if we are stuck
with GTK2 this is at least a lot smaller than Firefox and uses
far less memory.  About the same as Firefox 1.5 or Seamonkey 1.1.
Less than Opera 9.6 (around 35MB as I recall).  Opera 10 may work
for us still but the beta version requires libqt (dynamic).

The libraries used to compile it are in addition to the very long
list of dependencies (libexpat, freetype, randr, Xinerama, Xfixes....).


I doubt Firefox plugins work with Netsurf.

http://www.netsurf-browser.org
Claims to run in 16MB RAM (maybe it uses less if there is less).
May 2009 version 2.1.  Javascript support is in the future -
the main problem with this browser.

It can be used with a framebuffer front end instead of GTK.
Or an SDL front end.  This probably would save more memory.
No window manager.  Most video chips within the past 10 years
have fb support (not i810).  VESA 2.0 needed.

It was designed starting in 2002 for RISC hardware which
is no more than 200MHz, and was supposed to run on handhelds.
GTK since 2004.  Framebuffer port since 2008.  I would love
to see this compiled for framebuffer instead of GTK.

I think links can also run in framebuffer mode.

Not at linuxpackages.net  Vectorlinux 6 alpha was talking about
adding it in late 2008.  OpenSUSE may have it.  Packaged with Ubuntu.
Written in ANSI C and not based on any other code such as Mozilla.
They parse HTML with Hubbub.

Somehow their approach improves download or maybe rendering time.
I have not tried this on a slower computer yet since Puppy live CD uses
more RAM.  (Works fine at 1.7GHz with 768MB, loading all of itself
into half of this with a switch at boot time).  CSS support.

Sindi