One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.
In college I had one of those eeePC netbooks. It came with Windows XP on it, but it was so underpowered it couldn't really run a browser, so I threw headless Ubuntu onto it and got briefly good with emacs. I tried a few different console browsers; as I recall elinks was slightly better than lynx, but you could get most of the content you wanted back then, at least. I suspect that a large portion of the web is completely useless if you are still trying to use those browsers now.
I still have one of the original models that came with its own version of Linux. It worked really well with Fluxbox but unfortunately that's no longer being supported, it's currently running Puppy Linux.
