Well, the dnsmasq I can use for other things. I think I read on the Arch Linux BBS it would improve performance and speed, but I am claiming empiricism on someone else's behalf which is the descent into a badly administered computer.
The blank page serving is one parth aesthetic, one part performant. It looks better, and also certain Javascript items (for instance very persistent stuff like Google CDNs and the other players) time out even with this sometimes. Without, many pages would take ages to load with timeouts in HTML, CSS, JS, you name it.
So, it sounds like we are in a similar boat, so I thought I would let you check out my rig. I tried to get into uzbl, but Conkeror and LuaKit were more my style. I kept adding and removing LuaKit, because there is something I feel at home with in Conkeror (I think it is the Xulrunner/Firefox core, so I have been deploying custom kiosks in computer labs with auto-login and heavily modded Firefox instances with crazy user-pref for ages now).
The blank page serving is one parth aesthetic, one part performant. It looks better, and also certain Javascript items (for instance very persistent stuff like Google CDNs and the other players) time out even with this sometimes. Without, many pages would take ages to load with timeouts in HTML, CSS, JS, you name it.
So, it sounds like we are in a similar boat, so I thought I would let you check out my rig. I tried to get into uzbl, but Conkeror and LuaKit were more my style. I kept adding and removing LuaKit, because there is something I feel at home with in Conkeror (I think it is the Xulrunner/Firefox core, so I have been deploying custom kiosks in computer labs with auto-login and heavily modded Firefox instances with crazy user-pref for ages now).
Of course the mileage of others will vary.