Surf's a bit too minimal for my taste, but I found a couple of the other lightweight-ish webkit-based browsers on Linux serviceable, last I checked.

My motivation was I was trying to make a crappy dual-core low-clock Celeron rooted Chromebox with 2GB of memory usable as a light-duty workstation, a couple years back. I didn't find anything not webkit-based that I tried light enough to even be in the running. Firefox wasn't remotely close (nor were close Chrome-derivatives). Even light webkit browsers were practically limited to 1-3 windows/tabs depending on the weight of the pages, before they got unusable.