All of these recommendations for Falkon, Palemoon, Seamonkey. Honestly? None of these really make a difference to me, and Falkon actually runs like shit while not really reducing resource use!
Librewolf genuinely runs perfectly for me while taking up slightly (like 10%) more ram and vastly less cpu time. And it being a fork of Firefox, I can easily use all the addons I need (or can afford) to browse the web.
With Falkon stuff barely worked, was slow, and features were missing. With Librewolf, h264ify and a Youtube video as an embed within a tab. I can watch 720p/30fps video without issue. It baffles me on why this concept even exists, when the problem that is the modern web creates is that you really can’t make a new, much less lightweight, browser or engine.
And I don’t particularly care for Ladybird.
Okay but what shitbox are you running?
Thank you for asking imaginary poster in my head. Intel Atom N2600 with 1GB of DDR3 ram. It sucks. And it is testament to me just how nonsensical lightweight web browsers are, I’m sure that it’s Antix that is making it all work. Also I wrote this post on this shitty netbook and it’s weirdly smooth happily enough.
I don’t really know anything about this stuff, so feel free to tell me if this is a thing or that it wouldn’t work:
What if a new lightweight class of browsers emerged with an intentionally reduced set of features? Then websites that believe in that principle would build toward that standard and not use features beyond it. Could be more secure and faster to load. And if the standard gained traction, it would prevent the inevitable “power creep” done by web designers who would want to use all features available to them.
There is already a trend toward tech simplification using e-ink displays and “dumb phones”, so I think it could plausibly gain popularity.
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.
It would only be small websites with principles (such as the fediverse) that would do it. That’s fine. It is still worthwhile even if it doesn’t attract a geometrically expanding user base. The bourgeois craving to reach market saturation ought not to influence the choice of a small corner of the internet to carve out a simpler and more relaxed environment.
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.
The problem is the platforms (e.g. Facebook / YouTube / Reddit / etc), not the medium (the “world wide web,” aka HTML/CSS/JS over HTTP). End-users are largely uninterested in the medium, they are interested in the content. Social media, news, banking, email, checking the weather, getting directions, etc. For an alternative to take off, there needs to be new platforms which provide comparable experiences.
The Fediverse comes close. Yes, you still use it largely through a web browser, but there is a substantial infrastructure there which, while based on HTTP, is largely agnostic to the contemporary web browser. The web interface is just a front-end. The front-end is non-exclusive and it is possible to implement Fediverse servers without using a web app at all. There is not much standing in the way of developing a Fediverse platform with a dedicated client, and the distributed nature of the network allows this to be done piecemeal.
People will be sending hyperlinks all over the place until the day the world wide web is dead for good though, so there needs to be some way of dealing with them.