I don't regularly anymore, but until a few months ago my main portable coffee-shop machine was an old 12" Powerbook G4, which was a lot snappier with js turned off, especially on a few sites whose dynamic versions were slow as molasses, like Slashdot. Probably close to a worst case for js, because not only was the machine slow and low on RAM, but browsers use old fall-back js engines on PPC.

I also use 'links' from a terminal on occasion. It's gotten increasingly hard to use, but mostly due to layout issues rather than js, afaict.