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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The problem with targeting a subset is there's a ratchet effect with web APIs, once support reaches critical mass in the major browsers sites will start unconditionally relying on those features and there's no going back from there, any new browser has to also support those features or be considered broken.

I suppose anything that's gated behind a permission prompt in Chrome/Firefox/Safari could be culled without too much trouble at least.

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> The problem with targeting a subset is there's a ratchet effect with web APIs

What about starting a new web then only for the supported subset?

Based on my current browsing experience, this may be a plus in the long run.

There are now 3 competing standards.

You really just need two to see the positive effects, but three would be fantastic.

The problem is convining anyone to write a website in this. You will have like 3 sites that use only the subset.

The closest example is AMP, but you must be Google to force people to use it.

> The problem is convining anyone to write a website in this

Could choose a subset that lets certain sites that do not get on everybody's nerves still run fine.

For the remainder, people who need it can run an extension that runs a Chromium converting what's possible to the target subset.

Do you want to support YouTube? You want to support YouTube, don't you? Any big FAANG site probably uses most of the possible features.

> You want to support YouTube, don't you?

Of course no. You can use a bloated browser for that.

Then nobody will ever use your browser. Simple as that.

I think people forget the early 2000s. Many sites only worked on IE but Firefox was the better browser. Firefox users had an extension that would open certain links in IE or open the current page in IE via the context menu.

If a lightweight browser could be significantly faster and more secure, people would tolerate using two browsers again. Although Ladybird hasn't reached that bar.

YouTube certainly could use a small set of web standards, although YT regularly breaks on Firefox. It's a video player with links and forms.

> YT regularly breaks on Firefox

Source? I've never had a single problem ever, and I don't know anyone else that has either.

Sure, here's a couple mentions from just the last ten days. Loads more if you search around.

https://mapstodon.space/@hareldan/112619447620823614

https://techhub.social/@weston/112607264644039009

https://pdx.social/@crowdotblack/112604055589800602

https://social.bitwig.community/@gerotakke/11263106899010552...

YouTube has a vested interest to work best on Chrome.

It doesn't need to be mainstream, that will probably ruin it anyways.

So long as I can query the site for videos of interest and spin them up under mpv or VLC we're tots fine.

A surprising number of websites work fine without js.

Basically none of the ones I use look or work normal without it.

Websites with text content maybe, but the web is full of webapps which require JS.

This is more or less the idea behind projects like the Gemini protocol [1].

It's even deliberately designed to not be easily extensible, as to avoid the temptation of adding features.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

There is a reason that Esperanto or one of it's siblings is not the language of global understanding and we are discussing in English. The world at large generally does not care about these kinds of fancy. It's half a miracle that we agreed to whatever the Chromium engine implements to be a baseline that most folks build stuff on.

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