It probably can be used to save under-powered hardware from being discarded; one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing/basic productivity etc), it should perform well.
> under-powered hardware ... one would think that for limited-scope usage (e.g. browsing ...), it should perform well.
Alas, I fear that browsing is probably one of the things that require good performance and a huge amount of software and complexity. Because browsing probably involves "checking Gmail" (huge amount of JS, need a good fast JS engine e.g. with JIT etc.) or "watching a YouTube video" (need to have video codecs correctly connected to the graphics card hardware), etc.
I eventually found out that only the shittiest websites force you to have powerful computer and I could browse many of the most interesting ones using lagrange through a web to gemini proxy. Feels like having all the web in reader mode. Same can be done using a browser for the terminal such as w3m or links. Both support images nowadays.
A web browser is unnecessary to check emails anyway. Your example is probably the most easily solved.
It sometimes helps to use the mobile versions of websites instead. There are also dedicated email clients and tools like youtube-dl for downloading videos.
Alas, I fear that browsing is probably one of the things that require good performance and a huge amount of software and complexity. Because browsing probably involves "checking Gmail" (huge amount of JS, need a good fast JS engine e.g. with JIT etc.) or "watching a YouTube video" (need to have video codecs correctly connected to the graphics card hardware), etc.