Well, I tried links and w3m, and decided that today's web is better viewed graphically--your opinion may differ, but that is my own. So the next question was, "What's a good lightweight graphical browser?" I looked through the extension list and decided to try three: Arora, Opera10, and Midori. Here are some statistics that others may find interesting.
Physical size:
Arora + dependencies: 15.8MB
Opera10 + dependencies: 19.4MB
Midori + dependencies: 32.8MB
(Physical size was determined by running 'base norestore', installing a browser, and running 'du /tmp/tce/optional'.)
Memory usage:
Arora + dependencies installed, not running: 9.9MB
Arora running: 102.8MB
Opera10 + dependencies installed, not running: 24.5MB
Opera10 running: 86.4MB
Midori + dependencies installed, not running: 58.6MB
Midori running: 96.1MB
(Memory usage was determined by running 'free' on three occasions: immediately after booting into 'base norestore' for the base level, immediately after installing the extension, and then immediately after starting the program. To determine the memory required for an installation, I subtracted the base level from the amount recorded after installing the extension; to determine the running memory, I subtracted the base level from the amount after running the program. Tell me if there's a better way.)
Observations: For the smallest physical size, Arora is the way to go. For the smallest amount of memory used, Opera is the way to go. Midori seemed as thought it would be a bloated pig after I installed it, but surprisingly, its memory usage only 10MB more than Opera and 6MB less than Arora.
No conclusions yet; I still need to try them out for a while. More later?
Edit: by request, here are the figures for Chromium:
Chromium + dependencies, physical size: 31.7MB
Chromium + dependencies installed, not running, memory usage: 49.5MB
Chromium + dependencies installed, running, memory usage: 125.2MB