Every time I looked at DSL, I never understood the need to include 4 Web Browsers in a distro that supposedly prides itself on size.

When you look at the actual list of those 4, it's not as hard to understand any more.

It's Firefox, Dillo, Links2 and Netsurf GTK :)

Dillo is something I'd love to daily drive like I did 20 years ago, but it would just fail on most modern websites. But it's what, 2MB in total (binary+libraries)?

Links2 is text terminal oriented. No modern browser can do that natively at all. All competition is even smaller (w3m, lynx). Plus links2 can run in graphics mode, even on a framebuffer, so you can run it without X server at all.

So Fx is the only "general purpose" browser on that list, but is just too big for old hardware.

So you can use as little CPU and RAM as necessary to browse the page you want to read at any given moment.

Agreed. Why not have one installed by default and the other 3 could be recommended by DSL as alternatives?

This is an effort to preserve RAM more than disk while still having software that works.