I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

Isn't it called `netsurf` already?

I think the way forward is to let the HTML, CSS, JS Stack finally die and be replaced with something more appropriate. It's an ever growing mess of hacks and compatibility layers to make a technology do something it was never intended to do. Heck, your browser now supports USB.

We need something that's designed from the ground up to be a remotely loaded application layer for operating systems. But to get to that point, we need to throw away the decades of legacy requirements.

Be careful what you wish for. What if the news didn't report on corruption? Because you can find a whole lot of places where the news won't do that, and you'll know it only from gossip or involvement. What if the news didn't report on tragic events? Let's say a natural disaster or a horrific crime happens in your community, and the news media is just silent, pretending like nothing happened. I bet a lot of people would think it very strange if news media didn't report on these negative events, or if international news didn't report on the war.

> Someone burns a koran? It is only news if it is reported. If someone does it in their basement alone, it would not matter at all.

Yes, of course. But that's exactly what a protest is. It has nothing to do with the burning of the book itself, and everything to do with doing it in public and letting people know. Even if you live in the most rigid dictatorship, you can criticize the president as much as you want in your own basement. It becomes something completely different when you do it on a public square with a crowd watching or participating. But still there are those who want to make what happened in Tiananmen in 1989 become not news. Then it wouldn't matter at all, as you wrote.

As for Quran burnings, a person in my country - that is not Islamic - was sentenced for spitting at and burning the Quran as a protest against a recent Islamic massacre against people in his group. Imagine the situation: Your people are being killed because of a holy book, but you are not allowed to protest against that book. In that case the news media chose to be silent about the protest and about the sentencing of the man. Just an example.

The bigger problem with news media in my opinion is delivery. I can't stand any TV news, because the way the reporters talk is just sickening. They have adopted this kind of venomous and angry voice that just reeks with contempt against the viewer. I remember many years ago I had been out on travels and spent months far away from TVs. I the airport there was a TV with CNN on broadcast, and I was just shocked at how hateful the voices and demeanor of the presenters were. Like, why would anybody voluntarily watch and listen to this? But if you're used to it you might not notice.

But focus on negativity does also get exaggerated in TV news, such as when they are showing clips of traffic accidents far away, or floods in foreign countries that have floods every year, as well as murders in foreign countries that have no international impact. I think it is like you say to keep people in a negative mindset, because that makes them weak and ready to be influenced, not least by advertising that promises to make them feel good if they just buy this product.

I would not want a simple browser to replace gemini, but I would be happy to use a simple web browser in addition to gemini. It would be nice to only have to fire up a big bloated real browser for doing banking and such things.

This is great. Would you be interested to add support for a custom blockchain-based DNS instead of the current centralized hierarchical mess? I've been thinking about this a lot and it's clear that a multi-blockchain-based solution would be perfect for this (and far simpler than the current system). Each blockchain could have its own top level domain. People would buy domains using the blockchain's own tokens on the blockchain itself. The browser would just discover its own peers and query any node in the blockchain to convert domain names into IP addresses. The browser could check the results against known public keys on that chain to verify that the record is legitimate.

Blockchains are great for this use case as they are infinitely scalable in terms of reads (since you can always add more nodes which are exact cryptographically-verifiable replicas). While blockchains are constrained in terms of writes, this problem is dealt with via a transaction fee which increases with demand so it is naturally DoS-resistant and doesn't require special skills or trusted parties to operate.

Anyway, the current centralized DNS system of hierarchical resolvers is also constrained in terms of writes but it feels ad-hoc with many centralized entities which are given a substantial amount of trust.