this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Ok maybe off topic, why does a web browser have to be one of the most complicated software artifacts on earth? So expensive to write and maintain that only a few orgs with huge developer resources can do it?
What would it look like to start from scratch with a massively simplified standard for specifying UIs, based on all we've learned since html/css was invented? A standard that a few developers could implement in a few weeks using off the shelf libraries. Rather than reimplement every bizarre historical detail in html/css, have a new UI layout system that's simple and consistent, and perhaps more powerful.
Basically browsers are big because they are operating systems for web hosted applications with huge attack surfaces and lots of legacy compatibility requirements amassed over 3 decades.
A rewrite isn't the answer. Putting limits on browser functionality is. JavaScript was the turning point IMHO.
I think it could be sensible to come out with a subset of modern web tech stack, and just use that. There could be even a lightweight web browser just for this subset. The problem is of course on agreeing with what would be included.
If you don't want to be compatible with what millions of websites are written in (because that's the complicated part), you now have to convince all of them to invest lots of money to migrate to your new web standard... Good luck...
You don't have to replace the html web. If a new system was sufficiently fun to create with, people might use it for all kinds of cool new projects. Kind of like Flash used to be. You'd go there for a specific thing you heard about.
A new web free of cruft might turn out to be cheaper to develop for, and that might appeal to the corporate types. Maybe useful for intranet type apps where the browser is specified anyway and you have a captive audience.
Probably a lot better. The difficult, and expensive, part is getting everyone to migrate over to this new standard, not because it'd be unfeasible but because companies don't want to spend any time or money on things that they don't think will make them profit.
What we'd need is, for example, the EU realizing that Google's attempted monopoly on the internet is dangerous and requiring a certain standard for private consumer-facing websites to get the ball rolling.
Probably a lot like Gemini web. No, not the AI bauble.
I feel like this sort of thing should be more modular. Maybe on Linux we could in theory have multiple packages that could have different implementations and the browser UI would just use the underlying packages with their specific extras on top.
That would also align well with the Unix philosophy of each component “doing one thing well” and composing small tools to achieve complex tasks.
Splitting things add a different level of complexity (public APIs, deprecations, different versions, etc.) but it would make the web much more free, since we could have different individuals maintaining different packages and no organization would have too much control over the web.
I believe this is possible because we have very complex stuff such as entire Desktop Environments on Linux that are made up of multiple packages and each package just do a well defined thing and build on top of each other to create a “whole” experience in the end.