Not even terminal browsers, those are legitimately a bad meme that needs to die (then again, that's most software "design"). Just supporting a normal browser would be fine. Install and open Dillo. Look at how fast it is and how much RAM it uses. It supports images, it supports HTML (though only very early HTML, so no divs, so a lot of websites won't have the expected layout, but it's fine, that's why tables are clunkier but preferable because of their portability) even fully supports CSS. It uses the FLTK toolkit (maybe that's a reason why it's efficient, I don't know how much bad performance is the fault GTK 2 ~ 4 and Qt 5 and 6, but maybe some of it is).

Graphics have been around for a long time, there is no excuse for everything to be this bad. And developers that give up on them are just hiding their incompetence. They can't make something good, so they're not even gonna try, they'll avoid design like the plague. Fact is, graphical programs have been a common thing for 40 years, they have no reasonable justification to not be blazing fast.

Why are they this bad? I don't know, I'm not a programmer (and almost all programmers are incompetent, it's just a field that attracts moronic midwits, so they don't know either), but things were faster 20 years ago on Windows XP than they are now on Unix systems, and the antidesign of all these ncurses programs is not a solution to anything, these OSs are still in practice worse than Windows 2000 in everything but customizability and security, and (maybe) not glowing in the dark quite as much. It's better than other current OSs, but that's not much of an accomplishment anymore, it's like winning the special olympics.

Of course, it's not the fault of the actual OSs, but these systems don't come with default programs that are light and fast, while older proprietary OSs did. And almost everything that you can install now is pure garbage, and there's no backwards compatibility, so good luck running an older one. And the ones that I did run were horrendous.

These OS were always plagued by people with no interest in UI design. Makes sense, they were made by people that used fucking ed, after all, and thought that was fine. Thank Bill Joy for vi, and whoever the fuck actually invented Emacs for Emacs, or we would be still be using ed right now, AND we would possibly have no key bindings in the command line, like in Plan 9. https://social.076.moe/url/169256