I often dream of a worse web browser.

Since the 90s, browsers competed on features. We want the best browser, so we
add more features. And more features. And even more features. Too many
features. Now, Google Chrome, the clear winner, supports:
- Eleven image formats [AVIF] [WEBP] [PNG] [JPG] [GIF] [SVG] [BMP] [ICO] [TIFF]
                       [HEIC] [JXL (?)]
- Five key formats     [charCode] [code] [key] [keyCode] [keyIdentifier]
- Three GPU APIs       [WebGL] [WebGL2] [WebGPU]
- Two time systems     [Date] [Temporal]

Web development culture can often fetishize newness, so these features are used
across the web, even in places they where aren't needed, like blogs, landing
pages, and social media sites. So rendering even the simplest websites is
[nearly impossible], unless you are Google or you are funded by Google. The
best independent browsers [can't even render their own source code]. I applaud
the valiant efforts by the [Ladybird] team, but it's been three years and they
still aren't quite at alpha. When they finish, their browser will still be
massive, and incompatible with cheaper hardware. And Google will still own and
control our core channels of communication in the modern world.

The core problem is that we've turned a [[hypermedia]] format into a cross
platform application format, and now people publishing documents feel they need
to be app developers, and sites that should be static pages are now their own
applications.

Most things we do on computers are relatively simple, from a software and
hardware perspective. The original Macintosh team had fewer than 100 people. We
can still make tech from scratch today. But not the web. To run the web, you
need a browser, and therefore a living tech stack. If we didn't need Chrome, we
wouldn't need a modern OS, or modern GPUs, or fast networks, or C++ compilers.
If we didn't need Chrome, we could use cheaper chips, instead of only buying
from TSMC. If we didn't need Chrome, all hardware and software could be built
independently. The growing web has become the lynchpin that mandates all of
modern computing, and by extension, the modern tech industry.

You could ditch websites, but your friends will still be on Discord, your
community will still be on social media, and your goverment will still send
hurricane alerts through the internet. The growing web ensures tech companies
always have access to your life, to extract your time, money and attention.

I still try to imagine the web as interconnected documents: HTML as a set of
semantic tags, CSS as a small declarative styling langauge, and Javascript as a
simple dynamic scripting language with canvas for display, audio for sound, and
an event based input system. A subset of web tech could do all the same things.

A smaller web could be implemented by a single person or a small team. It could
run on lower-end hardware, and consume fewer resources. If we're going to build
an indie web, we need indie browsers, and this is how we do it-with a subset of
the web we can share, not a pseudo-operating system we're afraid of.