alt Hacker NewsI fantasize having a browser that I can use only for viewing content.
No applications. No mail. No need for cookies.
I can use a "regular" browser for more enhanced stuff. But for simple content consumption, we can just have a "dumb" browser that can't do much.
> A user agent that says the browser's version? Reasonable enough.
No user agent. I'm guessing it will need it for JavaScript or HTML features, and dynamically update if using an old browser, but let's just not supply a user agent and let it be the reader's burden to have a reasonably decent browser.
> Being able to ask for fonts, if the system has them? Difficult to have font support without that.
What's the fallback if the system doesn't have them?
> Getting the user's timezone, language and keyboard layout? Reasonable.
Keyboard layout is irrelevant for viewing content. For timezone and language: Yeah, I can see the use cases, but these are in a small minority. Let there be a popup when requested, and the user can specify the timezone/language as requested.
> The size of the screen, and the size of the browser window? Difficult to lay things out without that.
Let's let this new browser return only from a (small) discrete set of sizes. It will pick the size closest to the actual browser window size and send that.
> Of course a video or audio player needs to know which video formats your browser supports - how else to provide the right video?
Same answer as user agent. Either let the user pick from a selection of video formats, or just hard code a reasonable one and put the onus on the user to have a browser that supports it.
> Obviously javascript can get the time, and it's trivial to figure out the system's clock error by comparing that to the time on a server.
This hypothetical browser could just not send the time :-) For 99% of content consumption, this function is not needed.
What I'm describing should be part of "Private mode". Or browsers should have an "Ultra-private" mode that is the above. If it's too complex/risky maintaining it all in one codebase ... fine. Just have a separate browser.
Right now, if I built such a browser, I'm sure a lot of sites meant for content would break. But in my fantasy world, using "Ultra-private" would be the default, and people who make sites will target them first.
I think much of the complexity in making a web browser is all the "other" stuff. Being able to run apps, cookie/privacy management, etc.
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I can't edit, but I forgot to add:
No support for forms. The browser is meant for content consumption. Not for interaction/creation.
One could argue that any JS capabilities to do network requests (including dynamically rendering content) would be disallowed.
Yes, I know, this is going pre-Web 2.0.
Yes, of course, most current sites won't work in that model. But I'll also say: Most current content sites don't need these capabilities. They have them because they know the browser supports them.
Again - a fantasy. I know only a few people will use it. I know that won't be enough to change web behavior. It would be nice, though, if sites carried a badge to indicate they conform to all of the above.
Just use Tor browser? You can turn the tor part off if you need the speed.
What you want exists, have at it
i've had the same thought for 20 years and unfortunately it's less likely than ever to happen now, given how many sites require javascript and have cloudflare pages before even loading a site (I get several a day).
thankfully i think traditional web surfing is probably going to die out in the next 10 years, and progressively decline a lot much sooner than that as people start to interact with AI rather than browsers (or any software for that matter).
my feed of hackernews is going to be my AI agent giving it to me in plain text very soon, and soon after that i will probably never visit the internet again because it will be impossible to know what's real and fake
as a millennial it will be interesting to experience the full cycle of being born when nothing was online, to everything being online, to then again being entirely offline by the time i'm older
Unfortunately you've now made an incredibly niche browser, and the lack of those metrics is a good fingerprint by itself. How browsers render SVGs can be used for fingerprinting (even the underlying OS affects this, and I assume you'll want to see those), combine with ISP from IP address, and unless theres hundreds users in every city you're now pretty easily trackable.