Comment by alcover
1 day ago
I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with
- 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
That would make my year.
This would never happen because there's zero incentive to do this.
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).
> 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..
Just like all those normal people want rid of their bloated day-to-day monster of a web and therefore go and do something like, say, install an ad blocker?
Oh right. 99% of people don't do even that, much less switch their life over to entirely new websites.
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you know you CAN make small websites with the existing standards already
I have to disagree, AMP showed that even Google had an internal conflict with the results of WHATWG.. It's naturally quite hard to reach agreements on a subset when many parties will prefer to go backwards to everything but there situations like the first iPhone, ebooks, TV browsing, etc, where normal people buy simpler things and groups that use the simpler subset achieve more in total than those stuck in the complex only format.
(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%.)
I think both wearables and AI assistant could be an incentive on one hand, also towards a more HATEOAS web. However, I guess we haven't really figured out how to replace ad revenue as the primary incentive to make things as complex as possible.
Zero incentive seems a little strong,
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Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.
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.
Is MQJS faster or lighter than other engines though? It says the engine itself takes very little memory, but that doesn't say how it performs running all that bloated JS out there. Well also has "quick" in the name.
How it performs with existing JS doesn’t really matter in the context of my post, though.
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 soaring 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.
That's it. Plus they would work neatly on old computers/phones.
someone should embed it into dillo!
Better not. It already exists former QuickJS and QuickJS-NG, and parsing JS is a no light task by any means. Even Edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse can grind down to a halt an n270 netbook becaus of some sites with JS (both with qjs and qjs-ng). So Dillo would be no better.
Also, legacy machines couldn't run it as fast as they could.
What about https://geminiprotocol.net/
While we're wishing, can we split CSS into two parts - styling and layout? Also, I'd like to fix the spelling on the "referer" header...
why does it need to be two languages? why not style.css and layout.css and you self-maintain the distinction
There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind) - some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine - less sucky QML - i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform - much richer markdown format ?
It’s called WML/WAP
I think we can do better than a 15x15 text window
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And also bring back progressive enhancement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
Years ago I wrote a tiny xhtml-basic browser for a job. It was great. Some of my best work. But then the iPhone came out and xhtml-basic died practically overnight.
So you want 2026 to be the year of Google AMP?
Do it, man. Call it "MicroWeb" or whatever. Write an agent, make it "viewable with regular browsers". I think this could be cool.
I would actually merge html and js in a single language and bring the layout part of css too (something like having grid and flexbox be elements themselves instead of display styles, more typst kind of showed this is possible in a nice way) and keep css only for the styling part.
Or maybe just make it all a single lispy language
Not likely to happen. There is geminiprotocol with gemtext though for those of us that are fine with that level of simplicity.
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.
You mean like the piece of crap that was WAP?
I can't think of an instance of the web contracting like that. Maybe when Apple decided not to support Adobe Flash.
In the earlier days of the web, there were a lot more plugins you'd install to get around on most websites: not just Flash, but things like PDF viewers, Real Video, etc. You'd regularly have to install new codecs, etc. To say nothing of the days when there were some sites you'd have to use a different browser for. A movement towards more of a standards-driven web (in the sense of de facto, not academic, standards) is what made most of this possible.
Arguably XSLT
Would be cool to create a MicroBrowser, just to browser stuff that's compatible.
And Microsoftware running on the Micronet.
It needs a good standard library yeah? i don't see that in your list.
I think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just make a decent scripting language and interface for the browser and you don't need that nonsense.
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.
I think this is the ideal direction mainly because a lot of the webs current tech problems stem from websites that don't need app-level features using them. I was in web dev at the advent of SPA-style navigation and understand why everyone switched to it, but at the same time I feel like it's the source of many if not most bugs an performance issues that frustrate the average user.
I agree. Something componenty like Flash, yes. But it'd be easier to subset what already exists..
You can already create websites to these standards. Then truncate large parts of webkit and create a new browser. Or base it on Servo.
I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.
My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content.
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.
You can just use HTML4 if you want, it's already supported and standardized. Markdown is very much not.
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I believe this is the way we might get out of this mess.
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.
A few too many 9s there I think. You're estimating that only 1 person in every 10 million could care less. So less than 50 such people in the USA for example
Maybe you dont need a big enough % to change but a sufficient absolute number, which given internet size might happen with the right 0.00001%
Oh they would care if one shows them much snappier versions of services they use. They just don't know better.
And if you find you need more features than that - just build an app, don't make the web browser into some overly bloated app!
But most "apps" are just webviews running overcomplicated websites in them, many of which are using all the crazy features that the GP post wants to strip out.
Then you have to deal with os compatibility. That's the main selling point of the Web, it works everywhere.
And, I don't have to run a binary to try your product. The web has a lot of flaws, but it's a good way to deliver properly sandboxed applications with low hassle on the part of the user. I've built my fair share of native vs web apps, and I vastly prefer working on web apps. As a user, I vastly prefer web apps for most things. Not all things, but most. No, I don't want to install your crappy app on my computer and risk you doing something irresponsible. I'll keep you sandboxed in a browser tab that I can easily "uninstall" by closing.
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Well worth it. Even the very best web apps struggle to be as good as a decent native app, let alone mediocre web apps. The native operating system blows the web out of the water as an app platform.
Except when it doesn't because of browser or platform differences/incompatibilities.
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