Hmmm. I have a 2016-vintage celeron 3050 (think macbook, but $189 with half as many cores) and even on bare metal, web browsing is unusably slow without hw acceleration. Sites like HN load instantly, but amazon product pages take 10's of seconds after ~2 tabs.

This is with firefox (they also broke 3d acceleration in linux); chrome is OK, and so is firefox if I force enable video acceleration and ignore the severe visual artifacts.

FWIW, Chrome is still a bit sluggish on a 12 core xeon with no GPU, but it is usable (unlike Firefox on the same VM).

Anyway, I used to get away with no gpu acceleration on my laptop, but it became untenable in ~ dec 2016. It still sorta works on the server-side web browser.