My dander's up over that indictment of my use-case, so this is probably going to sound like a rant, maybe even a counter attack. It's very nice of you to live in the future and dictate what my budget should be. For those of us living in the real world, in situations where we don't have a successful "upgrade budget" more than every 10 or so years, it's the way of the world. I don't care about keeping up with the bleeding edge, I just care about keeping up with what works for me on this particular hardware/software combo. I bought this machine used in 2011, when I upgraded from a WinXP machine which, although it's still working perfectly well for everything but "modern" internet use, for some stupid reason just isn't good enough anymore to connect to a server, download a couple lines of text, and render it. But it can still play video games, run software (office, graphics, audio recording and processing, etc), and give me something I can type on which doesn't waste ink or paper. It can load software to read PDFs & ePub files so I can read books. It can load VLC so I can play my DVDs. But it has trouble dealing with the Internet.

Come to think of it, I think that's going to be my daily driver again for all those reasons.

Older hardware and "tech", to me, is uniformly better in comparison to the latest and greatest nonsense that "web developers" want to push down the pike. All you want is to take more of my system resources and put them on the Internet. That's not acceptable to me in the slightest. Your "newest technology" is my newest horror and the reason I've most recently questioned the value of computers as a whole. Taking one iota of control away from the user is wrong. Giving the user a structure which can be 100% customized with emergent properties the developers might not have had the forethought to include is what all software with a UI of any kind should be looking to do. Simply put, you are not the NetHack Dev Team. You do not think of everything.

As I said, I don't use most of the features the browser includes. I don't care about them, and I know that I never will. The older I get, the more I see the value in the method Stallman uses of downloading a page, parsing it to clear out all the gunk, and then displaying it locally on a non-connected machine.

There's stuff in there I think is horrendous, like all the stuff for ECMAScript. There's stuff I like, such as the full choice of theme and function, the fact that my settings are mine - not yours, not Mozilla's, not Google's - mine. But I respect that it's got value to some people who want to turn it on. I'm not a person who's going to tell you what bleeding-edge new feature they're missing. I'm a person who can tell you that this program does a reliable and remarkably thorough job of displaying downloaded HTML in the way I desire to see it. It lacks any really good gopher or telnet support, but I cannot ask miracles.

My use-case is not the standard and I recognize that. You asked me a subjective question. I gave you a personal answer. And now you're telling me the only Internet-facing software I see being even marginally decent is 'Underwhelming'? Your seeming lack of understanding when it comes to the nature of real life is underwhelming to me. Try the software for yourself. If, after using it with an honest attempt, you prefer to be led by the nose by Google and its cronies, then by all means i cannot prevent you; nor would I want to. I'll lag back and wait to see the problems before they reach me.