Comment by qweqwe14

20 hours ago

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).

11 comments

qweqwe14

Reply
alcover  20 hours ago

> 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..

  • dmd  20 hours ago

    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.

    • lioeters  20 hours ago

      > 99% of people

      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%.

      2 replies →

  • mxey  3 hours ago

    you know you CAN make small websites with the existing standards already

notKilgoreTrout  20 hours ago

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%.)

riedel  20 hours ago

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.