Actually, I saw Firefox described as "barebones" by someone else. It made some sense so I used it here. I've also see the term minimalist used in describing it. I haven't used something like Lynx, so I'll take your word on that. The point is that Chrome is minimalist compared to IE and Firefox and, IMO, Opera, too.
Lynx browses just through text- perhaps, the word that should be used when describing Chrome is more along the lines of "no frills", or, to be precise, "No frills interface".
Personally, I avoid using any program that "customizes" the titlebar, as chrome does. the minimize, close, etc buttons are still there, but the control box (which nobody uses, for the most part) which would normally be represented by an icon is not... it's a tad disallusioning and is a trait usually only held by dialog boxes.
The first <major> streamlining by ANY Web browser was actually made by Internet Explorer- I believe it was version 3; this was the actual use of "windowless" controls, for things like text boxes. I suppose this bears some explanation.
This comes as a surprise to many, but a "window" isn't simply the windows you can move around, maximize, etc, but also includes all the things on a window, such as a command button, text boxes, etc.
Early versions of Internet Browsers on Windows would often use, for example, the windows textbox control for textarea and input items. This makes sense- however, when you consider how many of these "windows" might be on a given page it becomes very slow. The internet Explorer team re-implemented all the controls used in HTML, such as textarea, option buttons, buttons, etc as Windowless controls, which essentially means they are simply drawn onto the web page, much as text would be; the actual clicking and other actions are interpreted by the browser window, which checks manually to see if any of the windowless controls had been clicked.
This made IE5 nearly twice as fast as Navigator 5 or whatever the competition was at the time.
Nowadays, all the browsers make use of windowless controls, so it's not really as important.
Personally, I've found the whole concept of "browser speed" to make absolutely no sense. the speed of browsing between pages is entirely dependent on internet connection speed- and apparent speed is hardly a smart metric to go by (for example, a browser could take 10 seconds to render a page entirely and still be considered slower then one that takes 5 seconds- if the first one starts displaying the incomplete page right away, and the 5 second one waits until it has all the information it needs before drawing anything.
Apparent speed comparisons are so personal and based entirely on placebo it's ridiculous to even pretend there is any way of measuring them. and the speed of the browser itself usually corresponds to system speed, and even the slowest machine I've ran it on (350Mhz) was able to run FF at a reasonable speed, so the only reason FF would ever be "apparently" slower then chrome, or any other browser would be due to plugins.
