For anyone interested, here are some web browsers that are actually lightweight (if not html5-compliant) and not webkit-based:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spiders&espv=2&biw=1439&bih=...
https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
On sites that require Javascript, it is useless, of course, and even moderately fancy CSS layouts look ... interesting in it. (OTOH, no Javascript means that it practically has a builtin adblocker.)
But for sites where that is not a problem, it is incredibly fast, plus one can have dozens of tabs open, and it will rarely if ever use more than 100 MB of RAM. For browsing documentation, it usually works perfectly well.