Unpopular Opinion

Your post has some merits, and I agree with some of it in spirit. But to me there are bigger issues at play. So many sites now perform horribly, not because of browser bloat, but because of crappy code on the server, relentless data harvesting, and targeted ads. And surfing the web without multiple layers of protection against bad actors is not a good idea. The whole thing is a shit show.

It feels like you're asking to go back to the late '90s. I clearly remember juggling plugins for Netscape Navigator and assigning MIME types to various apps. It was a mess. Modern integrated browsers are so much more predictable and user-friendly than the patchwork approach.

Remember when Netscape Navigator was the dominant web browser? The early versions of Netscape were light. We had to use Flash Player for interactive media and RealPlayer for video streaming.

I don't know how to feel about your opinion. While I like applications (and websites) to be light and simple, the Netscape kind of integration was a mess. Microsoft used ActiveX which was a security nightmare.

Modern browsers allow feature-rich applications to be built without depending on external services, which provides a seamless experience to users, especially non-technical users.

What I would prefer is a more bare-bone browser, but with add-ons supporting features as needed. I really dislike how Firefox bundles Pocket when it should be an add-on instead.

I agreed in principal, but getting the software to where I click and it just works would be difficult. Plus an average person would have a harder time understanding what to do. Like if I want to watch a video it transparently open vlc and plays, what would happened if it fails. I know my mother would not understand she would have to close or restart vlc.

Issue is: it's just too damn convenient!

Now, I'm a weirdo, so I actively avoid as many features as possible, but my life would be so much easier if I just kneeled down in front of chrome, and enjoyed the myriad integrated features. Or if I just found out what the F mozilla pocket is.

Past*

Down vote because I agree.

But let me introduce you to luakit, vimb, and similar browsers, which do indeed try to minimize the browser footprint - and to varying degrees of success.

And then let me next introduce you to Gemini, which can truly claim to be The Web, light. There's quite a bit of content, but it has been slow to gain traction and could be claimed to have stalled. If Gemini has failed, it's because it was pared too far back; even the gmi markup language is primitive, bare-bones, and unnecessarily ugly. Great idea, not so great execution.

I can understand you. It would also probably make sense for who uses older hardware.

I’d suggest getting rid of client side rendering and JavaScript. At some point web developers decided to try to emulate desktop app UIs and cram it into the browser. Websites used to be rendered on the server and the HTML was just sent to the client, which had to just parse and displayed natively. Is was really fast and efficient. This would also be a massive win for privacy and it would automatically eliminate all the spyware/adware client side JavaScript code.