I have a comparably powered Amiga to you (have we forumed about this before?), and find iBrowse to be very useable.
Javascript: I run with this disabled most of the time, and as pointed out, it's a huge user of computrons. Most sites are bloated with Javascripts with no noticable improvement in their function or appearance. Some sites that I don't want to surf without require it, Yahoo, etc. It's simple enough to switch it on when needed.
Caching: I have less ram than you and I only allow browsers to cache to the Ramdisk. This costs a little speed the first time a site loads but is faster later. Most importantly, I have never suffered a corrupted hard drive since doing this. Upon power down, the cached files are sent to oblivion where they belong. Why store thousands of small temp files that are destined to be useless in a few months?
I can't remember the source, but years ago, some one here pointed me to a site with tips, fonts, etc to optimize iBrowse and make it display pages more like IE and Netscape.
