Also have a look at links2 (http://links.twibright.com/)

Runs in text or graphical mode - the latter is excellent if you want to avoid javascript (unfortunately, CSS too), but still see the page with gfx.

Great keyboard navigation, a decent download manager, and blazingly fast.

You can open new browsing windows, and while there's no tabbed browsing, some users delegate this to their (Linux) window manager, such as Fluxbox, which features tabbed windows.

Assuming you have ruled out Chrome and Opera, what exactly do you mean by "lightest"?

well to be honest i didn't give opera a chance.

by light, i really meant fast, guess a bad choice of words on my part, i really just want something really fast, not even chrome seems fast enough to me.

Give Opera a chance. It's feels light/fast enough that I use it happily every day on a laptop almost a decade old and the keyboard shortcuts are fully configurable.

Text based browsers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELinks

not sure if w3m is what i wanted, but i'm really really enjoying it right now. thank you.