You can still browse the web using Opera 12.18, which takes a little memory, but the HTML5 support will be poor. The web has evolved since then.

Opera 12 source code leaked, so you could even port it to new platforms. Sadly multiple exploits, html5, and finally licensing make it a dead end :(.

Licensing is the only real problem, but that never stopped people from doing things either.

Opera really should have open source Presto when they switched to Blink.

For some reason Linux users never got an update to 12.18 or 12.17. Latest one was 12.16.

To be fair, that was also a much lighter web. Even if you remove all the heavy javascript overload modern webpages will be heavier simply due to higher resolution images and other media.

It also highly depends on what you want to browse. HN for example will work just fine without much memory. Expecting YouTube to be as light as 90s websites is asking a bit much.

Having said that, I do agree that we have overshot, and many websites are way too heavy for their use case.

Sticking with YouTube as an example, assuming for a moment that whatever device you are using does have hardware decoding, so video playback isn't dragging down performance. It still is an extremely heavy website due to all the tracking shenanigans, interactive elements and the fact that it is an SPA based design. Alternative front-ends like invidious show it is possible and in the past Google did actually provide light versions of many of their web apps specifically for this sort of use case. Sadly that is no longer the case.

On my Windows 7 throwback computer running an i5 3570K (a damn near top-of-the-line CPU 10 years ago) with iGPU, in Waterfox YouTube stutters when fullscreen in 1080p (even with enhanced-h264ify and hardware video decoding as far as I can tell), both in YouTube and Firefox's pop-out player. Videos play smoothly in Invidious. Enhancer for YouTube™ has a popout/embed button I could test, but it was pulled from addons.mozilla.org due to being broken by YouTube changes (it still works for me on my main computer?).

On my Linux laptop with i3-3xxxm (a low-end? CPU even 10+ years ago) with iGPU, in Firefox YouTube plays fine in fullscreen in 1080p even without forcing h264. Enhancer removal is indeed a loss. Can try ImprovedTube.

To be honest, that could be just be some interaction with Waterfox specifically. It's not the first time I have encountered people having various issues with that firefox fork that other browsers don't encounter.

My test video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEuHOFgjrAo watched at 1080p60 in full screen. It's a reasonably good test of 60fps smoothness, though synthetic scrolling tests like TestUFO screen recordings might be better strictly speaking.

- Tried creating a new blank Waterfox profile with no changes except uBlock0. It drops frames, and the borders of the video (4:3 pillarboxes on a 16:9 screen) have a blue or green tint after I seek.

- Same result in a new blank Firefox ESR 115.6.0 (last Windows 7 release) profile with uBlock0.

- The YouTube embed player at https://www.youtube.com/embed/lEuHOFgjrAo, on my main Waterfox profile, runs as smoothly as Invidious (no stutters unless I'm interacting with the player UI).

My laptop is an i7 4xxx so it's one year newer than yours and intrinsically better specced, i7 vs i5. I have no problems with videos. It could be the NVIDIA card in my laptop or the OS. I'm on Debian 11 now, which is much newer than Windows 7. Drivers, codecs, etc are more recent and possibly more performant.