Ask HN: Do we need Web Browsers?

Mind you my rent has been paid via web work the past 4/5ish years. I'm your average Joe Schlomo - the JS slinger.

However, it has dawned upon me - do we really need web browsers. yeah they abstract a lot of things and make things compatible between different computers.

But if we take a step back - browsers simply display text, play videos + other shit (which could be made native). [majority of the time]

if the majority of the time, we're displaying text on the web - why not curl then pipe the returned text stream to our favorite text reader/ editor. Then if I have notes, I wanna make on the page - I can simply edit and save a local copy. Thereby skipping the 30 million + lines of code shipped with Chrome/Firefox.

To me it seems really inefficient that we've millions of code lines sitting between passing two text files between 2 computers. Hell even videos/audio.