What is Reddit's opinion of NetSurf?

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The NetSurf browser has framebuffer support. I don't know how well (or even if) it will display grafana dashboards though -- It's not Firefox/Chrome so set your expectations accordingly.

The framebuffer build likely won't be in your package repos so you will need to compile it with make TARGET=framebuffer (see quick-start.md and using-framebuffer.md).

> If anyone's knows of a really simple web browser that'd be amazing

Well, web browsers are REALLY complex beasts, especially due to web developers wanting to do more via websites.

You can make a browser that renders basic HTML/CSS with a reasonable amount of time and skill, but if you want to get users, you'll need to implement decades of duct-taped APIs on top of HTML, CSS, and especially JS. Which is why you see most browsers today just forking Chromium (or in rare cases, Firefox) and calling it a day.

The only "new" browser I know of is Mozilla's Servo, but even that is (1) not nearly as finished as other browsers, (2) just an experiment, with the good parts being thrown into Firefox itself.

But, if you want to try out a simple browser, NetSurf is the simplest, but most useable one I know of.

Cause every tab is basically a docker container. A fully sandboxed environment that has filesystem, gpu and other hardware passthrough. On top of that, modern websites are not built to be efficient. Case and point, react, the standard of modern web dev, is already extremely bloated and inefficient, but it also gets loaded with even more bundled scripts and assets.

The web doesn't have to be bloated and tabs don't need hundreds of MB of ram (See browsers like NetSurf). However you'll give up alot of features that modern browsers provide, like JavaScript and everything built on top of it. Interestingly, alot of webpages don't even need JS to achieve the functionality they want (see gmail lite) and can still look very nice.

You should try swapping from lynx to elinks, it's so much better for terminal browsing. links2 -g is a good alternative if you want inline graphics but similar experience, too. Surf's still kind of heavy for something with the system specs OP is working with, but not really a way around using a lot of RAM if you need some sites to work. Though I'd probably use Midori instead for that, similar footprint but better interface and features.

Debian's supposed to have NetSurf but I'm not seeing it in stable right now, guess it didn't make the cut for some reason. It's an interesting one, though I've never had good experience with using it in Debian; it rendered pages fairly well but always had some weird wonky issues with UI and interaction. One of the few graphical options (links2 is another) that can work without X, though.

Another option is Dillo, which is insanely lightweight. It won't be usable for a lot of modern sites, though: it sits somewhere between links2 and a modern browser in capability. Still, good for some basic stuff before falling back to a heavier one.

>Why do modern ~~browsers~~ websites require so much RAM?

'cause people like shiny things, and market analysis shows 95% of users will not notice the performance impact.

>Could a really low footprint browser be made with the functionality of your standard browser?

You can get simpler browsers but the webpages will still be huge, and may not render properly. For example netsurf.

You can also find lightweight websites, for example https://bestmotherfucking.website - which actually lists some of the reasons modern websites eat up so much memory.

Actually mobile websites are much better about this, because mobile devices have, on average, much less RAM to work with, as well as data restrictions that most broadband connections do not.

NetSurf. I don't think it has any JS support but it supports HTTPS, HTML 4.1, and CSS 2.1 reasonably well which is better than any other non-Firefox/Chromium browser I know.

Apparently my crostini came with NetSurf because I don't recall installing it and there is no package to be removed by apt. More of a web viewer than browser but it's small and quick. Lynx seems to use it for graphical display display and it works ok configured into newsbeuter...