I'm also a huge Arch Linux fan. It's my only OS, and for the same reasons you're looking for: I just wanted the bare minimum. After you get the base installed

I'm also a huge Arch Linux fan. It's my only OS, and for the same reasons you're looking for: I just wanted the bare minimum. After you get the base installed, just type "pacman -S chromium", and it'll just install the dependencies, and voila. Then you can just put "exec chromium" in your .xinitrc and type `startx` each time you boot up, if you want to run a browser.