We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). Insecure, all the SPA and anything that require JS to see the full content.
Surprisingly, one thing that seems to work just fine in this environment is (even modern versions of) phpBB. Lot of phpBB dark web forums.
Also surprisingly, this doesn’t preclude polish or some level of app-like stateful interactivity, because CSS still works. You just have to think differently about how you use it.
One of the nicest things about Flash was that you could set your browser to only load and run Flash content after you click it.
Flash had some security nightmares all the time too if I remember correctly but I dont think it ever screwed me over like Java did.
I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. It would be nice to be able to block web APIs selectively to limit what a JS script can do.
IMO, it should be enough if incognito mode presents an identical fingerprint on everyone's browser.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about.
> what about things like viewport size and font rendering?
Not much can be done about viewport size, but a browser could easily ship with 2 fonts (one serif and one sans serif) and only allow access to those.
But also, even if they did, AFAIK browsers still mostly lean on OS text-drawing APIs for font rendering. Text in Chrome on Windows looks different than text in Chrome on macOS, etc. The same pile of beziers, and the same pile of hints, converts into a different set of hinted pixels (and sub-pixels!) when fed to each OS text-drawing API. Especially when those APIs are configured by user settings around subpixel hinting / "font smoothing", and when those APIs are aware of the device being rendered to and so render subpixels differently for high-DPI vs low-DPI screens, RGB vs BGR displays, etc.
If users decide they want pixel-perfect display, they can either resize the window to one of the allowed sizes or disable this feature for a specific page.
Of course you can. Viewport? Just return fake viewport data containing the most statistically common display properties. Website renders incorrectly? They only have themselves to blame, shouldn't have abused that data for hostile purposes. Data is a privilege, we can and should take it away. Fonts? Just force everything to use Noto Sans or Noto Mono. Everything will render correctly. Maybe the designer's vision won't be fully realized but that's not a problem.
Those incessant RCEs were only due to the sloppy way the Adobe Flash player was written. There is nothing bad security-wise inherent to the SWF format itself.
Ruffle is an open source Flash player in Rust, currently under active development. I'm sure it won't have such problems because 1) it's open-source and 2) it's in Rust, and I was told that anything written in Rust can't possibly have any memory-related vulnerabilities; we'll wait and see if this would still hold true if/when they implement JIT compilation for AS3.
Per-website, for dozens (if not hundreds) of APIs and convenient? These are contradictory :)
I've wondered for a long time if a sort of posh gopher based on markdown with extensions would be able to make a comeback. Especially if it allowed for CSS.
There's also the million-markdowns problem, and markdown's HTML embedding. This being Tuesday, I'd start with djot (without embedding), but Wednesday I might go for asciidoc.
And to be fair it makes a lot of sense because writing HTML templates feels super jank once you've experienced not doing it. Even for a site with static content I would still prefer to deliver it as a static JS bundle and a data payload.
I really like https://docsify.js.org. Gotta be one of the lowest touch libs out there. The whole site from git repo to page one single completely static asset.