xorg takes 2% here, not by the grace of a superfast computer - far from it - but by the simple expedience of having both Noscript and RequestPolicy installed. I can still read the article so I don't know what I'm missing by not allowing all that JS and external content to run/load. Not much, I assume...

Thanks! Your comment has encouraged me to test out NoScript. How bad I haven't checked this out before. I had this superstition that with NoScript I'd have to spare a lot of time configuring to just be able to reach a comfortable level, but I've been able to get going in a minute. Massively useful.

If a page is hosed under NoScript then just temporarily allow all scripts. You can spend a few hours building up a whitelist of hosts for your most visited sites if you can be bothered, but that's not needed for it to be useful.

Actually, while using NoScript, I've found out that there are a very small set of websites I visit often to bother to add exceptions: HN, github, hurriyet (a news website), tumblr, duckduckgo and maybe a couple others I can't recall.