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web browsers considered harmful
January 12th, 2020
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it's been itching at me for a while now, so i figured i'd write about it:
mainstream web browsers are bloated, wasteful, and encourage web antipatterns. every browser most people use (chromium and its relatives, firefox, safari, microsoft edge/internet explorer, etc) are absolutely massive, extremely resource-intensive, and do too much. you won't go one conversation about chrome without somebody mentioning how memory and CPU-hungry it is, and though each browser will vary in the specifics, none of them are *good* in this respect.
this isn't to say they have code that does the job inefficiently; not all of them, anyway. but caring about how efficient the code is would be missing the point: modern web browsers have too many capabilities. in my opinion, a web browser shouldn't do anything except display text and, optionally, display images. everything else should be viewed(, played, downloaded, etc) through dedicated utilities.
this means that browsers following these guidelines will be minimalist, making upkeep easier, producing less CVEs, and producing a less resource-intensive program that follows the UNIX philosophy. not parsing JS would certainly mean you wouldn't have a javascript parser with a security hole (see the recent vulnerability in firefox's JS handler).
surf (https://surf.suckless.org/) avoids a lot of these problems by doing less in general, but the layout of the web in general makes it not the best choice outside simple web content. particular features don't work at all with it, so it's no wonder why it's not commonly used. i've got firefox installed where i need to deal with heavier content. surf would be perfect and the only program needed for the web were the web better and more delineated between types of content. the main protocol for the web (http/https) was originally intended for text, and web 2.0/3.0 had some pretty big disagreements with that idea. see my next post for an elaboration on this idea.