- A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS
- A family of very simple browsers that do just that
- A new Web that adheres to the above
Browsers are complex because they solve a complex problem: running arbitrary applications in a secure manner across a wide range of platforms. So any "simple" browser you can come up with just won't work in the real world (yes, that means being compatible with websites that normal people use).
No, new adhering websites would emerge and word of mouth would do the rest : normal people would see this fast nerd-web and want rid of their bloated day-to-day monster of a web life.
One can still hope..
Oh right. 99% of people don't do even that, much less switch their life over to entirely new websites.
In 2025, depending on the study, it is said that 31.5~42.7% of internet users now block ads. Nearly one-third of Americans (32.2%) use ad blockers, with desktop leading at 37%.
(There are even a lot of developers who would inherently drop any feature usage as soon as you can get 10% of users to bring down their stats on caniuse.com to bellow ~90%.)
The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.
Also, legacy machines couldn't run it as fast as they could.
For a “lite web” browser that’s built for a thin, select slice of the web stack (HTML/CSS/JS), dragging around the heft of a full fat JS engine like V8 is extreme overkill, because it’s not going to be running things like React but instead enabling moderate use of light enhancing scripts — something like a circa-2002 website would skew toward the heavy side of what one might expect for a “lite web” site.
The JS engine for such a browser could be trimmed down and aggressively optimized, likely even beyond what has been achieved with MQJS and similar engines, especially if one is willing to toss out legacy compatibility and not keep themselves beholden to every design decision of standard JS.
But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.
Gemini is not a good or sensible design. It's reactionary more than it is informed.
I understand this has been tried before (flash, silverlight, etc). They weren't bad ideas, they were killed because of companies that were threatened by the browser as a standard target for applications.
Or maybe just make it all a single lispy language
Work towards an eventual feature freeze and final standardisation of the web would be fantastic though, and a huge benefit to pretty much everyone other than maybe the Chrome developers.
Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should be somewhat restricted.
It could allow to implement second web in a compatible way with simple browsers.
With a markdown over HTTP browser I could already almost browse Github through the READMEs and probably other websites.
Markdown is really a loved and now quite popular format. It is sad gemini created a separate closed format instead of just adopting it.