@icedquinn I spent a year in college with a laptop that had a browser/compiler/xserver in the initrafms statically linked into the kernel. So there was a 100mb or so EFI partition and I could just do whatever I wanted with the rest of the disk. I used chroots when I needed package managers for big thins.
IMO: rootfs from ramdisks is underrated, especially with how cheap ram has gotten.
@icedquinn I haven't used most things from gnome since gnome3 came to debian but lately I've realized just how incredibly worse it's gotten. The big surprise was the heavy use of JavaScript.
Also, I think epiphany might be harder to build than Firefox at this point.