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Just yesterday I installed Lubuntu 17.10 on an old Athlon XP computer. Firefox kept crashing, so I did a bit of research; turned out it was because the CPU doesn't support SSE2. Turns out most browsers these days require SSE2 (not that I blame them). The only modern-ish looking browser that's worked so far is NetSurf[0], but lots of sites have issues with it.

[0] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

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I have been down a similar path. I have an old HP laptop that used to run Windows XP. Its about 2005 model and has 1G of RAM. LXDE is only desktop that will give reasonable performance. Despite claims at being light I found Xfce based desktops slowed computer to a crawl.

The second thing I found was that all modern browsers literally consumed all resources on the computer making laptop unusable. I tried Netsurf which was fine on sites on which it worked. In the end I have found is best to use text based browsers. I use links2.

Compiled the browser a few minutes ago, rather interesting browser. It crashes on ssl/tls pages for me (I'll report / try to debug it more later), gdb is showing something about curl_multi_perform() / fetch_curl_poll.

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