The Web is bad and getting worst, not better. I still don't understand why browsers became operating systems.
We know because we do the latter and it hurts. Bad. Especially if you are targeting a wide customer base on multiple platforms. The pain.
Mobile OSes are somewhat better in this regard from a technical point of view, but in place of awful technology they have substituted the app store nightmare. I've dealt with both the Apple app store and the IRS, and the latter has far better customer service. This is partly because vendors wanted total control over the "next" platform, and partly because iOS and Android did not actually solve the security aspect of the OS application model. Instead they punted on the problem by deciding to just gate keep all code and to offer a reduced functionality profile to apps.
I am not entirely convinced browsers becoming OSes is a bad thing, and I half suspect that the web is actually an incubator for the next real innovation in the OS and platform space. The browser is at least prototyping an OS capable of rapidly loading and executing untrusted code without instantly melting down or being pwned by the first bit of malicious code that comes by. This is big. Try executing code this promiscuously with Windows, Linux, or Mac, or jail-broken Android or iOS for that matter.
The web became an OS because there's a huge demand for cross-platform zero-install software applications that run in a sandbox without dangerous user level access to your machine.
Top 50 Products By Total Number Of "Distinct" Vulnerabilities http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php
#3 Firefox
#4 Chrome
#7 Internet Explorer
#1 OS X
#2 Linux
#5 iPhone OS
#6 Flash
#8 Debian Linux
#9 Windows XP
#10 Windows Server 2008
Which is to say that, except for Flash, all of the top 10 products are browsers or OSes.
On the other hand, looking at the full list, I'm not so sure I trust the data curation. The JRE and JDK are each listed twice (because Oracle bought out Sun), and Internet Explorer and IE are two separate listings.
in term of security, popular browsers are in the top 10 of most exploited software
so yeah the delivery model is nice, the update model too, but still I'm not convinced that the web model for apps is the "end all, be all" of app development
I could even argue that more and more apps are coming back to native, first instigated by the mobile app stores, which then expanded to the desktop app stores.
There is room for everyone, web apps and native apps, but still I would not want to use something like gmail as a browser app on my mobile.
If you want a VM for executing untrusted code, use a VM for untrusted code, don't shoehorn it into HTML, or PDF, or whatever. That makes zero sense.
PDF is a special case since there's similarly a considerable value in having things like forms, equations, graphs/illustrations, etc. being interactive but since Adobe has a stranglehold on the format, it was characteristically poorly designed, badly implemented, effectively unsupported, and you had to pay to use it. I would not draw conclusions from this other than avoiding Adobe-encumbered ideas.
The other side of this position is forgetting how important network effects are. People did try to implement purer alternatives but they were always hindered by the need to deploy them first. The low-friction web model is extremely popular with users and any question of replacements or alternatives needs to fit into the gradual upgrade model of the web unless you can get Microsoft and Apple to ship it in the OS.
Think of how many businesses, groups, etc no longer have websites. They might have a meetup page, but they most definitely have a Facebook Page.
If they have a website, it often embeds their Facebook event listing or uses some Wordpress/Drupal plugin to sync it for them.
The Internet is more centralized and less distributed than it was in the 1990s.
I rarely use "modern" browsers for accessing the web. I do use them on private LAN's to access local files, but only because smartphones and tablets force you to use them.
On the web, I rewrite pages on the fly and view them with a text-only browser. Or I extract the bits I need from pages. In both cases usually I'm using a stream editor/filter, and sometimes a proxy if I'm modifying packets. Sometimes I put the results into csv or text files, kdb+, or cdb.
If I want to start using a "modern" browser I can do that any day at any time. The "modern" browser is always there if and when I need it. No learning curve. Beginners always welcome.
But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature.
Any tips? I would love to do this, both from my home computer and, all the more so, from my phone.
I've long used Linux, vim, and w3m for various sorts of tasks, some curl and wget as well. Wget is often blocked by sites unless it spoofs a more common browser agent.) I have similar preferences to you, though of late I'm largely using graphical browsers (Firefox by preference, for flexibility, Chrome unfortunately has better performance, though especially on Android, virtually zero configurability.
I've been thinking of scrapping much of this, un-rusting my emacs skills and doing something with:
* Emacs.
* Buffers.
* Built-in browser.
* Some local on-disk hierarchy essentially reflecting structure of websites I frequently access. Much of the information I access is actually pretty static, and there's a small subset of what I browse that's actually useful to keep.
* Extracting just the usful bits from each page. The primary text content and associated graphics, mostly. Dynamic and interactive components are rare, and there I'll likely hit up a graphical browser, treating it more as an applications environment.
* Metadata management. A standardised format of recording at least the site, publication date (if known), author (if known), access date, perceived quality, topic tags or categories (possibly a LoCCS hierarchy -- it's more sane than it seems), and a set of flags for issues (clickbait, bullshit, innacurracy, etc.) All this is shades of Vannevar Bush's Memex, though not a strict interpretation.
* A ratings and reputation system. What authors, sites, and publishers are or aren't generally credible or high-quality.
* Integrated management of multiple document formats: HTML, PDF, ePub, DJVU, Mobi, text, Markdown.
* If possible, a presentation mode that's more similar to Pocket than just a monospace text presentation, though that might also work.
* Annotations and notes.
* Bibliography generation.
Emacs strikes me as likely the perfet tool for much of this, with a bunch of built-in support already, from various modes, browsers, tools, Lisp, org-mode, etc.
Just rambling....