NetSurf is the fastest web browser which I found for desktop computers running on Linux, UNIX, RISC OS, and Mac OS X.
NetSurf is designed to be very lightweight, and work quickly even on very slow devices like the Raspberry Pi, PDAs, tablets, older mobile phones, and older computers with very slow single-core CPUs under 1 GHz in speed, less RAM, and a hard drive with very little storage space. NetSurf starts up almost instantly after opening it from its desktop shortcut.
NetSurf is one of the bundled web browsers which comes bundled with the Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian operating system. You can also find it in the Ubuntu software center, and other Linux Software center.
When I use Netsurf on the Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian OS, and Lubuntu 15.04 Linux, Netsurf runs very fast, and does not freeze, or crash. NetSurf is probably one of the only lightweight web browsers which would run smoothly and quickly even on all older computers which I own since NetSurf uses its own website layout and rendering engine which is design to use as little RAM, and CPU resources as possible, so it can load websites quickly. The web browser is also very basic, so it uses less system resources while Netsurf is open.
Netsurf installer download size is only 2.5MB in size to download from its website.
Netsurf also has most of the features of a standard web browsers like navigational toolbar buttons like back, forward, stop, refresh, home, address bar, status bar, scroll bars, menus, downloads manager, save page as, printing, web search textbox, etc. There are not any un-needed features in NetSurf, so the web browser runs very fast by starting up quickly, and loading websites quickly.
Netsurf can display some websites like Wikipedia, e-mail sites, forums, blogs, and other simpler websites which use HTTP, HTML, CSS, and other web standards. But, Netsurf browser can’t properly display more complex websites with JavaScript, plug-ins, and a lot of scripts like video streaming sites in my experience.
NetSurf works best as a basic web browser for quickly displaying websites like Wikipedia which are mainly text, and image based without complex designs, and features like video streaming sites with a lot of features.
NetSurf has some support for JavaScript, but not full support, so a lot of JavaScript intensive web sites like online gaming, video, and blog sites may not work well in Netsurf.
NetSurf is a very small, lightweight, fast, and simple web browser which works with RISC OS, Linux, Mac OS X, and other computer operating systems.
Download NetSurf at http://www.netsurf-browser.org/