there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers.
we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt computers and the internet. gaming, social media, all kinds of media distributed over the internet -- we have grown into the internet. and with this development, we are fast approaching a platou, a period of maturity where it is clear what exactly the internet is used for by most people in most cases, and also (critically) how those uses are implemented. when the internet was born, we made browsers with a turing complete language built in and we made all the tools very general, all because we didnt know what was going to happen. we had to be ready for anything. this is simply not true anymore.
off the cuff, the internet is used for reading forums, reading news, watching video and listening to music. perhaps a new kind of browser can be adopted that has those things baked in and nothing else. this kind of browser would meet most of peoples needs while being simple enough to make competition possible, thus aligning these new browsers with the interests of users. these browsers would be much, much safer as well.
for other kind of websites, sophisticated web apps that allow you to interface with a service, like email or time clocking or whatever, perhaps those things could be branched off into a new area where js, wasm and binary distribution live. perhaps a different class of browsers. with these kinds of browsers, there is more pressure to align with users interests because users can soft-boycott them because 90 percent of their needs are met by the simpler browsers mentioned earlier.
and perhaps a new standard for interfacing with documents can be baked into these new simpler browsers to further take necessity and power away from js and wasm browsers. for things like emails, remote document manipulation, assignment submissions, etc, a lot of that could be fit into a standard that is baked into the browser instead of being re-implemented in js for every instance.
a new class of simple browsers would create a new division of the internet that is clean, fast, simple and worry free much like these text only news sites.
if one could bake payment into the browser as well, creating the most friction-less payment experience on the internet ever seen, we could see a re-vitalization like that seen with patreon all over again.