Firefox

The modern internet, driven by corporate mandates, is rather complex. A browser needs to (at least):

• transmit and receive several protocols, usually HTTP/IP (ipv4, ipv6, http2, SSL/tsl for security, sometimes also ftp, gopher, torrents, etc)
• parse HTML documents and render them correctly to screen
• parse user input to forms
• parse CSS, correctly apply and cascade all the rules to the HTML element
• include a full, performant VM to run ECMAScript in, manipulate the rendered document tree according to those scripts
• include APIs required by ECMAScript covering the DOM, windowing, network requests, screen readers and other accessibility options
• render and work on at least 3 major desktop OS flavors and 2 mobile ones, across countless versions
• play media: images, audio, and video
• DRM handling for media
• Handle rendering of text in any world language

And that's just the tip of the iceberg! I've come around to the idea that the modern internet is actually, to be technical here, totally fucked. Big Tech is going to keep pushing users deeper into walled proprietary gardens. They've already made the open internet so complex and heavy that it requires a multimillion dollar company (dependent on Google's allowance or massive ad dollars) to create a browser for it.

I think the only solution is to throw it all away and start over. Twitter and reddit aren't being "saved" by the "resistance" users. The concept of free and open exchange of ideas on the net is being saved by new protocols and services that are built to resist corporate ownership, like Gemini and the Fediverse.

It's going to be hard weening off the flashy, ad driven Web, but its the only way. Go download Lagrange and start browsing Gemini space. If you weren't around for the 90s era of GameFAQs and the mostly-text web driven by individual writers and hosts, then here's your chance to go back to a better way of doing things.

We can't "fix" an internet that's owned by Big Tech, we need new spaces owned by the people using them.