People don't remember how awful IE was. Netscape wasn't significantly better. Both were considered "bloated".
Then, along came Firebird, and it was light and fresh. Unfortunately, a lot of sites didn't work with it. But users demanded that it should work, and eventually it did.
Eventually Firefox itself became bloated and Chrome was the faster alternative. It's the guys at Mozilla that dropped the ball this time.
Fast forward to now: Chrome is bloated, everything is bloated, everything is terrible, but we now rely on a tech stack that has grown exponentially just to get really basic stuff working. The difference is, this time we can't reasonably start fresh anymore without breaking backward compatibility.
Perhaps that's what needs to happen though: Break everything. Delete HTML, CSS, Javascript and all that crap. Admit that most non-trivial web sites are not documents, they're applications. Applications can display documents and do all kinds of other things. Figure out the minimal API that can efficiently output graphics, sound and video. Add in some accessibility hooks. Provide some optional interfaces to geolocation, storage, camera/mic etc. Done.
Fuck the semantic web. Just let us write applications.
Then, along came Firebird, and it was light and fresh. Unfortunately, a lot of sites didn't work with it. But users demanded that it should work, and eventually it did.
Eventually Firefox itself became bloated and Chrome was the faster alternative. It's the guys at Mozilla that dropped the ball this time.
Fast forward to now: Chrome is bloated, everything is bloated, everything is terrible, but we now rely on a tech stack that has grown exponentially just to get really basic stuff working. The difference is, this time we can't reasonably start fresh anymore without breaking backward compatibility.
Perhaps that's what needs to happen though: Break everything. Delete HTML, CSS, Javascript and all that crap. Admit that most non-trivial web sites are not documents, they're applications. Applications can display documents and do all kinds of other things. Figure out the minimal API that can efficiently output graphics, sound and video. Add in some accessibility hooks. Provide some optional interfaces to geolocation, storage, camera/mic etc. Done.
Fuck the semantic web. Just let us write applications.