I'm running Linux on two old, slow netbooks. I browse the net with Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and none of them do much to offset the inherent slowness of the CPUs on these computers (Atom N270 on one and nVidia Tegra2 on the other).

I know of Opera Mini on Android, and I used it successfully back when I had a phone running Android 2.3. I know that it can be ran on a desktop system using a Java Mobile emulator, but apparently there are problems - it doesn't save cookies or files, and sometimes it works erratically.

I wonder - is there a desktop version of some other browser that uses a similar proxy system to achieve the same result? I'm aware of Opera Turbo, but that only seeks to recompress stuff and generally make it a bit smaller bandwidth-wise, whereas Mini essentially rewrites the whole website.

is this what you are talking about:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/con...based_browsers ?

wouldn't you need someone providing that service first?

edit: there's a list of browsers at the bottom of the page i linked.

If you want a lightweight browser, try Midori. Further, any browser that uses a transcoder like Opera Mini or Turbo poses a security risk, as all your data passes through the transcoder, passwords, history and everything. Be sure any such service provider is trustworthy before you use their product. To be quite honest if you really want to speed up stuff like this, use a self hosted proxy like squid.