All of these recommendations for Falkon, Palemoon, Seamonkey. Honestly? None of these really make a difference to me, and Falkon actually runs like shit while not really reducing resource use!
Librewolf genuinely runs perfectly for me while taking up slightly (like 10%) more ram and vastly less cpu time. And it being a fork of Firefox, I can easily use all the addons I need (or can afford) to browse the web.
With Falkon stuff barely worked, was slow, and features were missing. With Librewolf, h264ify and a Youtube video as an embed within a tab. I can watch 720p/30fps video without issue. It baffles me on why this concept even exists, when the problem that is the modern web creates is that you really can’t make a new, much less lightweight, browser or engine.
And I don’t particularly care for Ladybird.
Okay but what shitbox are you running?
Thank you for asking imaginary poster in my head. Intel Atom N2600 with 1GB of DDR3 ram. It sucks. And it is testament to me just how nonsensical lightweight web browsers are, I’m sure that it’s Antix that is making it all work. Also I wrote this post on this shitty netbook and it’s weirdly smooth happily enough.
It’s a question of features and user expectations. Users right now prefer to go to the big websites, so using alternative browsers doesn’t have any appeal, and those websites have every reason to use more and more features (for advertising)
There are some that are trying, such as the gopher protocol, but they are very niche.
There needs to be something compelling about the lighter browsers, and I do think a simpler experience will tie into that. One possibility is that CSS is no longer server side, allowing users to create their own styles and interfaces, like WinAmp skins of old. That would be rad. A smaller set of standards would help keep things simpler for designers.
The problem is the platforms (e.g. Facebook / YouTube / Reddit / etc), not the medium (the “world wide web,” aka HTML/CSS/JS over HTTP). End-users are largely uninterested in the medium, they are interested in the content. Social media, news, banking, email, checking the weather, getting directions, etc. For an alternative to take off, there needs to be new platforms which provide comparable experiences.
The Fediverse comes close. Yes, you still use it largely through a web browser, but there is a substantial infrastructure there which, while based on HTTP, is largely agnostic to the contemporary web browser. The web interface is just a front-end. The front-end is non-exclusive and it is possible to implement Fediverse servers without using a web app at all. There is not much standing in the way of developing a Fediverse platform with a dedicated client, and the distributed nature of the network allows this to be done piecemeal.
People will be sending hyperlinks all over the place until the day the world wide web is dead for good though, so there needs to be some way of dealing with them.