I imagine he actually meant that Firefox/Chrome/etc are prioritizing a different demographic of users now than they used to. Both are becoming more of an OS in which you run web "apps" rather than just a browser to display and read webpages. Web apps need a consistent base set of features that may not exist on all OS platforms. By providing it internally they signal who and what the browsers are designed for. Other people might consider these features bloat.
To answer his legitimate question: try Pale Moon. It's a browser that respects your freedom and does not include bloat.
Qutebrowser is also worth checking out. I haven't really given it a full blown test drive yet, but it's certainly less bloated than Firefox and Chrome, and has Vim-like keybindings.
I use VimFx which doesn’t modify the browser chrome as much as Pentadactyl (apparently). It simply provides lots of convenient Vim-like keyboard shortcuts. I also use the ItsAllText! extension with GVim configured for editing text boxes. I'm not aware of any issues that either have with the new extension architecture.
