Hi all,

I need some recommendations for a browser which has the following qualities:-

Reasonably 'fast and slim'
Doesn't cache any browsed data
Can be configured so as not to download any pictures by default
Can declare itself as IE7 running on Win XP.

It's to go on a very small Linux netbook with a fairly low download limit, hence the need to cut out as much crap as possible.

Thanks,

C. Clueless.

lynx -cache=0 -useragent="Windows; U; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; en-US"

you never specified it needed to be GUI based...

I was going to suggest a console-based browser...kinda let it go, though.

Firefox can do it with plugins.

Opera can do it built-in.

Firefox is more popular; I prefer Opera.

Thanks for the tip, but can one config Lynx so as not to download pictures, so only empty frames are shown? That's important with a 1Gb/3months limit! Also, does it support hypertext or does one have to enter every single URL on the command line?

Lynx doesn't show pictures, as it's completely console-based. Thus I expect that pictures aren't even downloaded.

Yes, it supports hypertext, you can easily follow links by selecting them and press Enter.

I also thought that it could render image comments (ie, what you see in a mouseover of an image).

Possibly. Not sure, though. Would have to check. Anyway, this wouldn't require actually downloading the image as it's part of the HTML-markup.

I agree...I didn't suggest that. I just wanted to point out to the OP that even when he can't see an image, some pages will show such data so that he has a good situational awareness of the article being read.

I believe lynx will just display the "Alternate text" property that you can assign an image in html..
I thought of Firefox with plugins as well.. but I've never found firefox to be lightweight.. it can be rather a memory hog when it wants to be.

Heres an article you might want to peruse. to find a few GUI browser options that might also fit the bill...
http://freshmeat.net/articles/lightweight-web-browsers

I also suggest using a text based browser. If you are limited it's the best option. Firefox and alikes generate lots of traffic for I-don't-really-know-what-purpose, extensions can alleviate this to an extent, but I am not sure they are that efficient. Text browsers will not only generate much less traffic, but also they will render pages much quicker even when the download speed is very limited. And with that principle in mind, you could also make some estimations and cap the max download speed to make sure that you won't waste the bandwidth of 3 months in 3 days.

Smart web designers validate their pages, so every image should have the alt attribute in place, and that's what the browser will show instead of images. I guess that most browsers use that for that tipical yellow hover labels, not sure. You could also consider using squid or any other proxy to reduce the traffic if you'll be using the same web sites all the time.