a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits.
mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.
mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.
Performance took a giant hit some time in the 1.x series and never recovered, but before that, it was remarkably lightweight and snappy, so much so that normal people would notice.