Unpopular Opinion

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Web browser have extended way passed what was necessary (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Web browsers were very limited compared to today's offerings but still very extensive when compared to other applications. Now, browsers on desktop are at a point where they're equivalent to an OS in scope.

This frustrates me as it's led to stagnation, where very few companies can hold their position. Firefox can only keep up due to preexisting groundwork and the large amount of funding from Google. Chrome had billions thrown at it to quickly enter the market.

The thing that kills it the most for me is there is no way to fix the massive amount of effort needed for a web browser. It's extensive because it has to deal with thousands of situations: image rendering, video rendering, markup language support (HTML), CSS support, JavaScript support, HTML5 support, security features, tabbed browsing, bookmarking and history, search engine integration, cross-platform compatibility, performance optimisation, developer tools, accessibility features, privacy controls, codec support, to name a few.

Now, for my unpopular opinion: stripping back a general-purpose browser to its core, forcing web redesign, and modularising the browser. Rather than watching videos in the browser, an instance of VLC would be started where the video will be streamed. Instead of an integrated password manager and bookmarks, we have something akin to KeepassXC with better integration. Markup documents and articles automatically open in word processing applications. I know this idea seems wholly impossible now, but it often crosses my mind.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I’d suggest getting rid of client side rendering and JavaScript. At some point web developers decided to try to emulate desktop app UIs and cram it into the browser. Websites used to be rendered on the server and the HTML was just sent to the client, which had to just parse and displayed natively. Is was really fast and efficient. This would also be a massive win for privacy and it would automatically eliminate all the spyware/adware client side JavaScript code.