But why have a huge complex browser in the first place? Do people really get much satisfaction from HTML gimmicks? Are they more interested in media (images, audio, video)?

Let's say you want to watch video. Download the video using a program designed for that. Then watch the video using mplayer which works fine with the Linux fb.

Same goes for photos. Download the photos quickly and efficiently using the command line and pipe them into a fb-friendly photo viewer.

There used to be this idea called MIME. Using separate programs to do separate things. Small simple programs that do one thing well. Mozilla has all but abandoned this concept. We all had to suffer through the hassle of Adobe Flash, only to finally admit it sucks and watch Adobe kill it. (.sfw = "small web file" - nice try guys)

And it now takes hours if not days for most consumer machines to compile Firefox. The compexity burden for a "modern web browser" is through the roof. The program is a monstrosity.

(And the codec jungle makes a simple video player like mplayer far too complex. We need some common sense here folks.)

Honestly, no.

I use gmail as my email manager, calendar, tasks, contacts, documents, and general organizer. That's why I haven't migrated to mutt or other console email client.

I agree that not all javascript is needed, but I wouldn't consider Gmail a gimmick

That would be awesome! I have an old computer which can barely run X, I could try firefox on the framebuffer

Well, to be honest a hardware-accelerated X server (which you'll get with even something as lowly as a 10-year-old S3 card) is faster than the framebuffer. What you might want to do is run X with a minimalistic window manager. Try "fluxbox" or "blackbox", both of those take about 1mb of memory :)