Barry, you may be interested in a miniature browser called litebrowser. Depends only on gtk3 and gtk3mm (since you already ship EasyOS with gparted, then you already have all the dependencies). It's only about 319K compiled.
It's network access speed is rather poor (as it uses synchronous connection) and like typical small browsers, it doesn't support Javascript; so I won't recommend it for online experience, but for filesystem access (e.g. help browser, welcome page), it is very usable. It's smaller than netsurf (1MB compiled) and even smaller than dillo (575K).
And thank you for sharing your discovery of Symphytum, it's a nice personal database