I feel like there is room for a FAST browser with very limited CSS and no JS support. It could spur a minimalist information driven trend.
it might if anybody would actually use it, but that seems unlikely if it doesn't have CSS or JS support. Chrome and Firefox are already really damn fast if you give them a simple site without much css or js. people just need to actually make sites like that.
This is the problem I see with initiatives like Gopher and Gemini.
The people causing the problems with the web are not the people who will listen to these initiatives.
They are banks, advertisers, FAANG, everyone who is fine making money off the standard Chrome-IE-Edge crowd and barely even care about Firefox support.
Both Gemini support and a sane subset of HTTP / HTML require the same level of dedication that I could bring, but no commercial site will. Well, to be blunt, minimal HTTP / HTML is a lot easier. I can keep my same hyper backend, Firefox client, Nginx for TLS termination, curl and libcurl and pycurl, lots of tools that will only work on HTTP.
Plus, minimal HTTP 1.1 is not that hard to implement, so I think they're mostly attacking the wrong part of the stack while also cutting out useful performance features like QUIC or pipelining or caching.
You want to write a custom stylesheet for every site you use?
I can understand this sentiment, and if there was a reliable way to implement it I would do it as well.
There are ‘readability’ plugins and services for browsers that attempt to provide this service for current sites. These days it’s a bit more complicated than just overriding a few styles to make a page ‘standardised’.
The plugins / services work for maybe 99% of pages I look at. Unfortunately I don’t know how to view the whole web through such a lens, without having to activate for each page.
If, hypothetically, browsers stopped offering powerful scripting capabilities, the app makers of the world would not suddenly say "I guess we'll make static webpages", they'll say "here's how to install our all-powerful unsandboxed application". Powerful scripting on the web means more applications running in safe sandboxes.
It’s a requirement for a general purpose, modern browser, unfortunately, even one without a bunch of bells and whistles.
This is the case even for many municipal or government sites, to say nothing of business products/services/vendors. You can’t use the web as a private citizen for normal things like banking or civic participation without js.
Couple that with the idea I've been toying with for a while about a new html standard (html6?, core HTML?) that only accepts loading JS from a common repository of utility code (think useful stuff like autocomplete, partial page reload etc) and it could improve the web a lot if we got sites to use it.
When I browse the web, I know the browser puts me in control, and keeps applications contained. The only kind of app that I know will have comparable sandboxing is a PWA. Anything with a comparable amount of control will look like a web browser, and we already have the web.
If you want the world to change, you have to offer something better.
You speak of the web as an app platform - I'm not opposed to some platform like that existing (and they do exist, just look at your OS), I just think that we made a mistake when we turned the browser into one. Now we mix together hypertext and code and have so much weird legacy to maintain, not to mention the performance issues.
Sure if you have a nice application that is interactive, fine use a PWA, Electron or whatever you want but for showing plain text and iamges a subset of html and css is enough