technology

Those front-end wrapper sites like Invidious, Nitter, Libreddit, etc, were great alternatives that from what I understood had little JS usage. I think there are definitely people making this kind of stuff still but it seems relegated to front-end alternatives mostly. I'm always happy to see these services running around. We do have diethex.net after all.

Also, double-dipping for a moment, unfortunately I don't think the websites would ever budge. The BIG websites are all trying their darnedest to collect as much user information / metadata on you as possible; Data is the new oil. If you break a lot of JS functionality people won't be able to do a lot of stuff we take for granted on the internet.

So it's pretty much impossible to trim the web down to a reasonable feature set, because the entire history of browser technologies is someone releasing a poorly designed API that's missing something important, then a later standard releasing a new layer of APIs that solve that hole in the design by being more powerful and flexible, but that one's also poorly designed and missing something important, repeat process 100 times. Each layer is more powerful than the last, which isn't what you want with a lighter browser, but then you go to the bottom of it and you can't have a three-column layout.

I could imagine creating a nice standard that replaces it from a clean slate, though.

You could also make a javascript library that renders the whole new standard, and just package your websites in that, though. That's awful, but the modern web is a nightmare, so similarly gross systems happen all the time, and it's not really worse than the status quo.

And then you could make a browser that, when it sees a page using that library, ignores it end renders the clean slate standard natively. Or, for the more ideologically motivated, only renders that sort of page.

But as fun of a technical challenge as that is, it's really a social challenge to get enough people using this weird new thing.

It's a question of features and user expectations. Users right now prefer to go to the big websites, so using alternative browsers doesn't have any appeal, and those websites have every reason to use more and more features (for advertising)

There are some that are trying, such as the gopher protocol, but they are very niche.

There needs to be something compelling about the lighter browsers, and I do think a simpler experience will tie into that. One possibility is that CSS is no longer server side, allowing users to create their own styles and interfaces, like WinAmp skins of old. That would be rad. A smaller set of standards would help keep things simpler for designers.