Nowadays users switch browsers to escape from AI nonsense. But in all seriousness, just enabling an ad-blocker significantly increases the speed of the browser, because, as you correctly noticed, website bloat is the largest bottleneck. And usually "raw" website content is only small fraction of all other stuff that gets loaded from various remote sources to show you ads and track you better.
And to take speed point even further - disabling JavaScript does wonders to website speeds, you won't believe how quickly some websites are loading. Logging in to banking website might not work at all, though.
I've been playing Dragon Age Origins recently, and I've been popping into the Steam overlay browser to look up some stuff, which frequently leads me to the wiki. And oh my god, I can't believe how bad the internet is without adblock these days. Every page visit, it pops up ginormous video ads that cover 90% of the web page, and it needs to chug along to get the initial render done before I can collapse it.
> You will probably already feel this difference every time you launch it.
How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ?
It is also a moot point with modern processors and modern OSs.
Even more so in Orion's target macOS market where you can leave an app open without any windows open (not minimized, I mean not open at all) , so its ready to go at a click.
Unless you are regularly using all your RAM, there is a very good chance the browser's files are going to stay in disk cache and be effectively instant to load. 100MB is an imperceptible load time difference on a modern system where memory speed is 50-100GB/s or more.
When all my windows are in one big stack (Windows, macOS), then multiple windows just get in the way and I’d agree.
But over the last couple months using better window managers like sway or niri, I tend to open new app/browser windows next to the windows they are related to.
