And in my limited tries Netsurf is faster and much much better at displaying modern websites (not perfect of course).

Weird, I felt a huge latency gap between the two. Of course dillo renders things naively so it's almost an immediate mode, but it also regularly display things under 0.5s[1] which feels impressively good.

[1] if not lower... I can't time it, but to describe it I'd say, rendering is done when the Return key is up. Seriously nice.

Or just surf.

http://surf.suckless.org/

surf provides a minimalist interface but isn’t really in the same class as Dillo and NetSurf. It’s a full‐fledged WebKit engine, while these two use their own custom, lightweight rendering engines.

Good point. I should give Dillo a try.