Hi,
well, of the two, NetSurf seems more promising, more like the line of "dillo" which was long one of my favourites, when it was still gtk1.You may also want to take a look at NetSurf: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ Which is written in C and has it's own rendering engine and small dependency footprint. There's also wildfox, which strives to be minimal (whatever minimal means when it depends on Qt, but I'm not judging it.) http://www.mayaposch.com/wildfox.php
Well, it's several years on this and it is currently, as far as I know, the only native Objective-c one. It does not implement all of WebKit and never will, however what is is a drop-in replacement. This should make the engine interesting to embed also in cross platform applications between GNUstep and Mac/Cocoa.There are enough attempts to write browsers out there already, please don't write yet another one, but try improving what's there first. I think if you write yet another one, you're just wasting your time as well as everybody else's. Browsers always turn into operating systems. Maybe something could be done about the core of the problem, which is actually the inefficient structure of the thing we call web, which isn't primarily used as a source of information anymore, but rather as some way to design fancy user interfaces. Maybe someone™ should try doing something about that.
NetSurf however looks nice and seems to have a pretty decent renderer, I'm installing it from pkgsrc now.
Riccardo