Best low-footprint browser?

I installed Firefox 6.0.1 on my 12 year old desktop running win2k once I formatted it, since it was running IE6 for the longest time. I did so because well, Mozilla is all the rage (or was) and figured it would be compatible with most sites nowadays.

I notice on a lot of 'tech savvy' sites, people recommend Firefox 2 or 3? This version I am using is a resource HOG (my system has 648mb RAM total) and a half. It's actually worse than using the old IE6 that came with install discs, which of course is now counter intuitive to my main goal of streamlining a legacy system.

And before you say anything about this not being laptop related, I am strongly considering doing the same for my M17X as well if I get the responses I like Will dualboot XP and like a low-footprint browser for that system as well.

So anyways, with those things considered, what do you think? I'm not looking for statistics, but personal opinions. I value one or two people's opinions very much on this subject, versus a website that spits out stats on all the main browsers.

Anyways, I like Firefox because it actually loads multiple .gifs properly, UNLIKE IE. But this version is just a hog and the CPU is a 1.3 ghz pentium 4, so something small but still able to view pictures/video with good clarity is necessary. So, is FF 2 or 3 or 4 the sweet spot? I want to avoid google's browser. Any other suggestions?

And my apologies for making this such a long post for such a simple question. I haven't posted here in a while LOL.

 

A list of lightweight browsers is here : Lightweight Browsers
Personally I have used K-Meleon, but I have no real need for a lightweight browser and went back to Google Chrome, because I missed all the extensions.
It is a good browser imo.
I would also look at http://secunia.com/community/advisories to see if there are unpatched vulnerabilities for your new browser of choice.
Please let us know your findings.

 

Thanks for the list Gandalf. I am currently trying out K-Meleon now. It runs less memory with two tabs open than Firefox does with 1, and seems to require less CPU time, so that's great so far!

It has more buttons right after installation, which is a bit strange, but I haven't fully gotten the hang of it yet so I won't comment until I have it running for a few days and fully customized.

 

You could try Google Chrome, it runs really well on older systems. I would hope you try Firefox 7 before you decide to ditch it, as it decreases memory usage dramatically.

 

Are all of the browsers on that page faster than chrome?

 

So, I've been using K-Meleon for a few days now, and it's buggy at best. Since it shares the engine with Mozilla, there were several conflicts on my desktop system. Despite boasting a 'highly customizable' feature, the options are more limited than Mozilla where it counts, and you can't even set a simple feature like 'open a new tab while remaining focused on the current one'. It doesn't load icons properly for favorites either. It also installs this 'loader' which runs at startup, and it DOES in fact preload the browser engine into memory (also in taskbar). It loads nearly instantly (surprising on a legacy system since NOTHING loads instantly). It loads faster than double-clicking on "My Computer". But if K-Meleon crashes, or you close it with several tabs open, it bugs out. It gunks up the network with a bunch of unfinished packets and Comodo shows several connections still going on (but no packets coming in/going out). So that's annoying. Have to close the loader and that clears it.

It still loads fast, and it actually loads webpages faster than mozilla or internet explorer did. It has a tiny menu system up top so you can maximize your page viewing on-screen.

Fastest browser I've tried. You can apparently use a bunch of Firefox addons with it as well. I'm not a big addon/plugins kinda' guy, so I cannot comment on this. But if you're using an old system and need something that will load pages fast out of the box, this it it.

 

a lot of people (me included) thinks that opera behaves well on low end machines... try it?