Look, Another AI Browser

The main problem with this is if browser A adds feature 1 and browser B adds feature 2 then you don't end up with "Chromium + 1 + 2" you end up with "Chromium + 1" or "Chromium + 2". Repeat for a couple dozen Chromium folks and your single extra feature doesn't look all that enticing anymore. The inverse way of looking at it is "if you're only adding 1% on top of Chromium, it's unlikely to amount to anything worth the average user switching for". Especially since Chrome is starting to push Gemeni natively anyways.

For these reasons, I think Chromium paint jobs are the least interesting thing to happen to browser development in a very very long time. Servo for embedded, Ladybird for "something different", and so on are much more interesting. These kinds of things, as you say, are more to the scale of what an individual browser extension used to be.

I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.

Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.

I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."

Like an information OS for the information cloud.

It should be fast when rendering HTML/CSS. I don't really care about JavaScript performance, because where possible I switch it off anyways.

It should be customizable and configurable, more than Firefox was before Electrolysis and certainly much more than Chrome.

It should support addons that can change, override, mangle, basically do everything imaginable to site content. But with configurable permissions per site.

It should support saving the current state of a website including the exact rendering at that moment for archiving. It should also support annotations (like comments, emphasis, corrections) for that. And it should support diffs for those saved states.

And if you include "the browser" in that:

I want a properly usable bookmarks manager, not the crap that current browsers have. Every bookmark should include (optionally, but easily) the exact page state at the time of bookmarking. Same for history.

Sync everything to a configurable git repo: config, bookmarks, history, open windows/tabs, annotations and saved website snapshots.

I want easily usable mass operations, like "save me every PDF from this tab group", "save all the pictures and name them sometopic-somewebsite-date-id.jpg" or "print all tabs that started with this search and all sites visited from there as PDF printouts into the documentation folder".

I want the ability to watch a website for changes, so the browser visits in the background and notifies me if anything relevant is different (this could be a really hard thing to get right I guess...).

I want "network perspectives" (for lack of a better word): show me this website as it would look from my local address, over this VPN, with my language set to Portuguese, ..., easily switchable per tab.

I want completely configurable keybindings for everything, like vimperator, but also for the bookmark manager, settings, really everything.

And I want a pony ;)