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).
> 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.
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.
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%.
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%.)
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.
Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.
The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.
Is MQJS faster or lighter than other engines though? It says the engine itself takes very little memory, but that doesn't say how it performs running all that bloated JS out there. Well also has "quick" in the name.
How it performs with existing JS doesn’t really matter in the context of my post, though.
For a “lite web” browser that’s built for a thin, select slice of the web stack (HTML/CSS/JS), dragging around the heft of a full fat JS engine like V8 is extreme overkill, because it’s not going to be running things like React but instead enabling moderate use of light enhancing scripts — something like a circa-2002 website would skew toward the heavy side of what one might expect for a “lite web” site.
The JS engine for such a browser could be trimmed down and aggressively optimized, likely even beyond what has been achieved with MQJS and similar engines, especially if one is willing to toss out legacy compatibility and not keep themselves beholden to every design decision of standard JS.
Better not. It already exists former QuickJS and QuickJS-NG, and parsing JS is a no light task by any means. Even Edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse can grind down to a halt an n270 netbook becaus of some sites with JS (both with qjs and qjs-ng). So Dillo would be no better.
Also, legacy machines couldn't run it as fast as they could.
There could be a way:
This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation.
- TV screens UI
- some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind)
- some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine
- less sucky QML
- i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform
- much richer markdown format ?
WML/WAP got a bad rap I think, largely because of the way it was developed and imposed/introduced.
But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.
I think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just make a decent scripting language and interface for the browser and you don't need that nonsense.
I understand this has been tried before (flash, silverlight, etc). They weren't bad ideas, they were killed because of companies that were threatened by the browser as a standard target for applications.
I think this is the ideal direction mainly because a lot of the webs current tech problems stem from websites that don't need app-level features using them. I was in web dev at the advent of SPA-style navigation and understand why everyone switched to it, but at the same time I feel like it's the source of many if not most bugs an performance issues that frustrate the average user.
Years ago I wrote a tiny xhtml-basic browser for a job. It was great. Some of my best work. But then the iPhone came out and xhtml-basic died practically overnight.
Be the change you want to see in the world. If you want to use a specific subset of HTML, CSS and JS, go ahead, make a website using it and offer a browser for similar-spec sites.
I would actually merge html and js in a single language and bring the layout part of css too (something like having grid and flexbox be elements themselves instead of display styles, more typst kind of showed this is possible in a nice way) and keep css only for the styling part.
Not likely to happen. There is geminiprotocol with gemtext though for those of us that are fine with that level of simplicity.
Work towards an eventual feature freeze and final standardisation of the web would be fantastic though, and a huge benefit to pretty much everyone other than maybe the Chrome developers.
In the earlier days of the web, there were a lot more plugins you'd install to get around on most websites: not just Flash, but things like PDF viewers, Real Video, etc. You'd regularly have to install new codecs, etc. To say nothing of the days when there were some sites you'd have to use a different browser for. A movement towards more of a standards-driven web (in the sense of de facto, not academic, standards) is what made most of this possible.
I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.
My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content.
Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should be somewhat restricted.
It could allow to implement second web in a compatible way with simple browsers.
HTML4 + CSS (2?) + JavaScript is already huge platform, very much not trivial to implement. Like you can already do something like that with niche browsers like links, but it's obviously not working, so something else is needed...
A few too many 9s there I think. You're estimating that only 1 person in every 10 million could care less. So less than 50 such people in the USA for example
But most "apps" are just webviews running overcomplicated websites in them, many of which are using all the crazy features that the GP post wants to strip out.
And, I don't have to run a binary to try your product. The web has a lot of flaws, but it's a good way to deliver properly sandboxed applications with low hassle on the part of the user. I've built my fair share of native vs web apps, and I vastly prefer working on web apps. As a user, I vastly prefer web apps for most things. Not all things, but most. No, I don't want to install your crappy app on my computer and risk you doing something irresponsible. I'll keep you sandboxed in a browser tab that I can easily "uninstall" by closing.
I will pick a web app over a proprietary "native" app every time. That way, it can stay in a sandbox where it belongs. Discord, Zoom, Meet, Trello, YouTube, and various others, all stay in sandboxed browser tabs.
I have several web apps installed over the native alternatives. Discord is the most prominent one; I've found their native app has been getting shittier by the day over recent months, while the web app remains as snappy as any Safari page. Plus I can run an adblocker and other extensions in the web app which improve the experience.
Well worth it. Even the very best web apps struggle to be as good as a decent native app, let alone mediocre web apps. The native operating system blows the web out of the water as an app platform.
I agree so much. For all we know yet, there's nothing out there. Nothing conscious or even sentient. So our lives and the life on earth are infinitely important.
I never understood this `we're but a speck`. Do you know of many other specks with life ?
The universe has been around long before humans existed, and it will be here long after humans no longer exist. If humans are the best the universe has, then that's just a sad bit of commentary. Not understanding the but a speck is just denying fact. We may be the only speck with life, but we're just a speck with life. If the life on this speck was able to hop from speck to speck and utilize all of the universe, we could have a conversation.
Consider this: In the movie, the Truman show: Truman is living on a giant hollwyood soundtage with thousands upon thousands of cameras following his every move allowing the TV Audience to subjectively experience his life - his life is writ large on the minds of billions of people- but it is only one life.
Now imagine instead- If the Universe is conscious, instead of that being one big conscious observer looking down; perhaps instead we (each of us humans, animals etc as life act as living observers) living our first person subjective perspectives like a multitude of cameras for the universe to experience itself on Earth
And we can imagine that happening at all scales simultaneously across all living worlds and other forms of mind throughout the cosmos, ie consciousness as first person observers might be as innumerable as the number of stars in the sky, and these living perspectives or subjective cameras are dotting the whole immensity all unify to provide the universe with an eye on itself in infinite perspective ..
Doesn't that make up for humans being puny tiny lifespans - we (our insignificant bodies) are just disposable cameras for consciousness
I'm not so sure. I've watched my cat sit there and scheme. Sure, it may be not much further than "what's this thing do if I bat it with my paw?" or "what's that taste like?" or "can I train my hooman to refill the food dish if I incessantly whine and be as annoying as possible?", but they are definitely thinking about it. Then again, I've watched my cat stare off into space as if he's pondering the mysteries of the universe, but he's probably just trying to figure out the best route he could take to get that squirrel if he could just get outside.
> tracking of this information down to that level would be pretty pointless
Maybe pretty pointfull tracking shadow economy. When Bob sells moonlight stuff his clients will more often than not simply go to the ATM, withdraw the sum and hand it to him. Bob will then buy at shop with big bill. Shop owner will deposit bill at bank..
And how do you know which bill from the shop is Bob's? Or which hands the bill passed through before or after going through Bob? The only thing you'll be able to determine is that some of the money withdrawn from the local atms eventually gets spent at the local shops, which you could probably intuit.
The latter has an identifier, bar; the former doesn't. The standard uses tag to refer to the identifier name, if any, in an enum, struct, or union declaration.
I've always called "tag" the id that optionally follows struct/union/enum. Is it the wrong word? Some specs call it "name", but "unnamed union" sounds dangerously similar to "anonymous union", which is a different concept, namely (no pun!) an unnamed member of an outer struct or union whose submembers can be accessed as if they belong in the outer one. E.g.
struct {
struct {
int m;
}; // no name: anonymous
struct s;
s.m = 1;
> as Julia Ecklar sings, it's kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a tool.
I was taught assembler
in my second year of school.
It's kinda like construction work —
with a toothpick for a tool.
So when I made my senior year,
I threw my code away,
And learned the way to program
that I still prefer today.
Now, some folks on the Internet
put their faith in C++.
They swear that it's so powerful,
it's what God used for us.
And maybe it lets mortals dredge
their objects from the C.
But I think that explains
why only God can make a tree.
For God wrote in Lisp code
When he filled the leaves with green.
The fractal flowers and recursive roots:
The most lovely hack I've seen.
And when I ponder snowflakes,
never finding two the same,
I know God likes a language
with its own four-letter name.
Now, I've used a SUN under Unix,
so I've seen what C can hold.
I've surfed for Perls, found what Fortran's for,
Got that Java stuff down cold.
Though the chance that I'd write COBOL code
is a SNOBOL's chance in Hell.
And I basically hate hieroglyphs,
so I won't use APL.
Now, God must know all these languages,
and a few I haven't named.
But the Lord made sure, when each sparrow falls,
that its flesh will be reclaimed.
And the Lord could not count grains of sand
with a 32-bit word.
Who knows where we would go to
if Lisp weren't what he preferred?
And God wrote in Lisp code
Every creature great and small.
Don't search the disk drive for man.c,
When the listing's on the wall.
And when I watch the lightning burn
Unbelievers to a crisp,
I know God had six days to work,
So he wrote it all in Lisp.
Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.
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