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Since many people have asked me to review their favorite "minimal" browser, I will just cover them all in one fell swoop. By default, a browser will load all the content that it supports, including cookies, scripts, CSS files, frames and videos. The majority of modern websites rely on lots of third party stuff which is either useless to display the website, or can track you.
In an unmitigated browser, all the tracking scripts, CSS and images will be loaded - sending your data to Facebook, Google and others - and also slowing down the loading times. This is despite the fact that the site works perfectly well without any of that stuff. It does look ugly though, and enabling the bootstrap CSS file fixes it. And here we encounter the problem with all minimalist browsers - they cannot block stuff they load per domain. Either they load everything from a certain category (that is, if they even support it) or nothing. So, in such browsers, if you wanted to make Euractiv look as it is supposed to, you'd have to enable all CSS - including the tracking ones from Google.
Let's look at suckless surf. You can run it with options that tell it to disable images or scripts. Disabling images means you will see pure text, enabling them shows all the images including the 1px tracking ones from dedicated spy corpos. A site could have one image needed for understanding the content, and 10 tracking ones; or one script needed to run the site and 10 advertisement spreaders, crypto miners, etc. - and the minimalist browsers can't distinguish. The only tool that can do so, is uMatrix - and the only browsers that support that are the fat ones. With minimalist browsers, you have to choose between functionality and privacy / speed - uMatrix gives you both. And that is why minimalist browsers suck, my friends. The only time I'd recommend them would be if you only visit sites that make no third party requests. This used to be common in the early Internet, now it is almost unheard of.
Don't get me wrong, the minimal browsers do have advantages. They usually don't spy on you (no unsolicited requests), they are more configurable (having keybindings by default, for example), they lack some antifeatures, sometimes they have their own engines so don't depend on big corpos, take much less disk space and use up less CPU / RAM etc. However, most of the evil of the web comes from the websites themselves. And the only tool that can handle that properly is uMatrix, which the minimal browsers don't support. And unfortunately, that one single disadvantage overcomes all other advantages these minimal browsers might have. This isn't going to change, either - sites are not suddenly going to become minimal - which would have to be the case for these minimalist browsers to be viable. Of course, the "major" browsers will eventually become even worse, "modern" websites even more bloated and malicious. Therefore, long term, we will need to create our own web which is usable with minimal browsers. I have written this article with the assumption that engaging with the modern web is still necessary and / or worth it for the reader. Since even the minimalists still keep around a modern browser for certain websites, I am trying to show the best / least harmful way of doing so. And that - in my opinion - is still Pale Moon with the proper addons.
UPDATE November 2022: qutebrowser is somewhat of an exception, since it does have jMatrix available (CF warning). You can lift a config file from uMatrix / eMatrix and just drop it there, there is no graphical UI / grid for fixing sites though. I have no experience with it but someone told me it works. But not all of it, apparently:
Right now, all we do is block incoming requests. uMatrix does a bit more than this, such as spoofing noscript tags when js is blocked. It also means we cannot block cookies (so those rules will be ignored).
It is possible to block third party (or all) cookies in qutebrowser, but you lose the per-site functionality of uMatrix / eMatrix, then. Note: qutebrowser isn't quite "minimal" either way, being dependent on the Blink (Chrome) engine. Just know what you're signing up for.