This OP is mostly some ranting along with information.

I'm a knowledgable tech guy, so I like my security. When it comes to web-browsers, it is just as important as ever to make sure to practice good security and privacy meassures and use something that also respects that from you. The problem is, the internet today relies on so much to even meet basic functionality, when prior to Web 2.0, it was pretty dang easy to make your own web browser if you wanted to put in the effort. Web developers mention today how difficult it is to make your own web engine, considering all the JavaScript functionality, HTML5 and CSS3, and support for web apps. Without these features, you have a browser that can't even use Google.

How did we get here? I blame both the Browser Wars and Web 2.0:

The Browser Wars, simply put, was a battle to dominate the web browser market between Internet Explorer and Netscape. While many others were in the running, the two top lions battled each other by adding additional features to become better than the competition. In the end, Netscape won, and it's engine carries on in Firefox.

Web 2.0 was an evolution of the internet, an upgrade trend that ended up taking off. It brought us things like micro-blogging, social medias, and user generated content. Around this time, corporations started realizing how much they could profit off of the internet.

Both of these things combined what I believe to be the downfall of the Internet. By downfall, I mean the decrease in the quality of the experience for the end-user to browse the internet. The Browser Wars added a mash of features for both browsers, lots of them being used today. They were hurried in and while they functioned fine at first, promoted a bloated internet browsing experience. Web 2.0 brought on the corporate advertising and privacy-invasion that we have today for monetary gain. Both of those combined brought us sites that take ages to load but also gain a profit from us loading their page because of tracking cookies and advertisements. While attempts have been made to make this experience better, it is still very much a mess to this day.


Now, onto the big deal: Browsers themselves.

I hate modern web browsers. None of them are good enough to run the modern web and none of them are secure or respect your privacy at all. All browsers that actually respect your privacy or right to security lose a ton of features in the process. It's a nightmare. You might be reading this going "Well I use Opera, it's a good browser" but you don't realize you are just running Chrome with extra steps.

Remember when I said this?:
This rings so true, it hurts. While there are many different web-browsers, there are only 3 major web engines. What's a web-engine? Well, it's the core of a web-browser. Web-engines are in control of parsing and processing the web. Every web-browser out there is just a skin with features slapped onto a web-engine. The three major web-engines are Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Blink is used by any Chromium-based browsers, Gecko is a Firefox engine, and WebKit is forced on iOS devices and is used primarily by Apple.

All of these have their pros and cons, but the big ones (Blink and Gecko) phone home constantly. While Blink has been hell for a long while now, only Gecko has recently gotten bad on this nightmare. It's nearly impossible today to use a decent browser and not be left behind.

So, what's left? There are some projects that are trying to make their own engine. NetSurf, while still in active development, has seen better days and is definitely aging. Servo intends to be a better replacement to web-embeded applications, but it's still got a lot to go. Right now, it just seems like the web-browser market is riddled with nightmares, and I wanna have hope for the future of the web but all this talk about "Web3" and "crypto" makes me believe otherwise.

Now, I have not talked about WebKit yet, and it's because I feel like this is a place where Apple is a good guy. Both Blink and Gecko phone home and/or have proprietary code required for them that you don't get the source code for. WebKit on the other hand, is entirely open-source. Never phones home, can be entirely forked, and is fast and efficient. It's a good enough engine that Blink is actually a fork of it, and WebKit itself was a fork on KHTML (a now outdated engine). It still isn't perfect, but I prefer it over the other two. The big problem though is it's lack of browsers. There is quite a few browsers that use it (Opera pre-12 used it), but their features are lackluster and primitive at best. It's an upsetting pile of sadness.

And that concludes my TED talk on why today, the web is a mess. Can't even run Youtube well on a decade old machine.

Feel free to add to the discussion or mention your favorite browser. I would love a new one. Been using Falkon lately, reluctently with the Blink engine. Literally calls trackers loading the audio and video elements, I've got that blocked. Also feel free to link any websites about this subject.

I'm not a tech expert (although I'm interested in tech stuff), but maybe the reason web browsers from this decade don't run well is because your using a 10 year-old machine.

Granted I don't know if you've made any hardware upgrades, but things have changed a lot when it comes to the computer world of 2022 compared with 2012.

I used that as an example. I having a high performing machine I built a few years ago. It runs like a champ but chokes with web browsers. It shouldn't matter anyhow. The only reason websites don't run on 10 year old machines very well is because the web is a bloated mess. Web-developers started being lazy while developing and use some JS frontend that just adds more to the pain. The web is mostly 2D and it's just elements of varrying textures, text everywhere, and media. This should be as easy to run on an old machine (with modern browser support) as on machines today.

Things have changed a lot, but 10 years ago isn't really that long ago.

Let's not forget how bloated the modern web itself is, and how lazy web "developers" are. People believe that the only way to do something is to rely on a framework with dozens of features they won't be using, and a lot of modern websites don't work on anything that isn't Chromium. No, seriously. Try starting an Aternos server, or creating a Steam account, or accessing SoundCloud on Firefox for Linux (may or may not work depending on some arbitrary factorsーnot because the browser is incompatible, but because SoundCloud will deliberately refuse to load in some cases).

I asked a friend of mine to help me develop my Firefox plugin, and he wasted a whole hour refactoring my code to an unnecessary extent that made it more complicated and harder to read (less would fit on the IDE screen). Yes it was technically cleaner, but then he wanted me to use frameworks. UI frameworks, which wouldn't even work for the job the plugin was supposed to be carrying out, and a bunch of other stuff that wasn't even remotely necessary. This is the way people are taught to write code, and it triggers me so bad.

Have you tried looking at the source code of a modern social media site? Like Facebook? Or YouTube? Notice how everything is obfuscated to ward off those pesky customers from reading into the spyware? Or how every platform likes to use blobs instead of web addresses to make content harder to back up or download? The web is not free like it used to be. And don't even get me started on how absolutely awful the DOM of some of these sites is. It's so cluttered with so much unnecessary garbage, and a lot of it is a result of those lazy UI frameworks people use. It's a miracle that lower end devices are even able to load these pages at all. If you're on a slower internet connection, good luck, because it is going to take you a looooong time to load something that could be reasonably compressed down to a couple kilobytes.

Don't get me wrong. There's definitely a time and place for it, and these tools are very useful. But some of the practices my generation of developers are learning just disgust me. These sorts of things would not fly when developing something else, like a game engine. Another friend of mine, who isn't a web developer but is extremely proficient in C++ instead, complimented me on how clean my web code tended to be compared to others. I didn't even put that much effort into it, and I wouldn't consider myself very good. I just don't like using a giant library that takes time to download or import over the internet when I have everything I need built into the browser's interpreter already.

And then there's the practice of shoving EVERYTHING into a web engine. Native desktop applications even. Discord is just Chrome. Krunker is Chrome. Everything is Chrome. This is horrible for performance, it's all bloat. There are so many extra features these programs are not using that the web engine is still packing, and it eats up storage and CPU time. They're also missing features that are necessary. Games in browsers do not have raw input support because browsers were not designed to play games. Controllers only became usable in browsers recently.

I'm sorry if this comes off as toxic, or arrogant, or overly critical, but I really do not like the web dev space as a whole, whether it be the content you read or the browsers themselves.

This is true, so true. Amen

No, preach it.

This is why I develop my site the way it is. I try to use as minimal dependencies as possible. I just did a quick test, keep in mind that this is definitely not perfect, but a quick load of the twitter home shows the HTML alone is over 700 KiB. Compared to my site, this forum thread with this amount of text, all these elements around, buttons and icons, only amount to 30, and this is only the HTML page itself. Imagine how much this translates through Javascript and CSS. And here I was thinking my site was bloated.

This. This is what I absolutely hate the most. Everything being essentially Chrome is not an issue alone, but the huge increase in laziness developers have and just make shit in chrome. There are good reasons for embedded web-browser systems. Heck, I hate that Discord uses it but if it only a small example, I wouldn't mind it as much. But no.

I recently got into a debate with a stranger. Topic came up while playing a game about programming. Dude says he's a programmer too. Oh cool, except he then states how he works on web-applications. Things did not go so well after that. Things to note though are that his argument for "web browsers being inefficient" was "why not use all the system resources we have now and let them not go to waste". The thought process of people for web-applications absolutely baffles me. How do you even respond to such stupidity.

There are valid uses for JS frameworks, there are valid uses for embedded web applications, but this does not mean everything should use it. Only a very very small amount of things that use web applications or JS frameworks today actually need it or are better with it. So I repeat: The web today is a nightmare.

Some more benchmarks that have not been heavily tested or perfected. For these, I simply disabled caching and reloaded the page. I then examined the total bandwidth right after the load to avoid duplicate nasty constant AJAX calls most sites do.

Google: 2.05 MB
Surprised me none but I'm sure Google 10 years ago was even smaller. It's just a search bar and some buttons, and that's all you need.

GMail: 24.25 MB
Actually surprised. Considering my internet plan is 25 Mb/s, to think that GMail would need to utilize almost 100% of my plans bandwidth to load in less than a second is insane considering it's just emails. No email content has even been loaded.

Youtube: 12.86 MB
This did surprise me, considering I thought the thumbnails would make it a lot more. However, this doesn't mean it's any good. I have my expectations set low.

Twitter: 9.44 MB
This one isn't a homepage because my secret account had a lot of images and media for it's first loaded tweets, so I chose an empty profile that I could find instead. Despite what you say being small, Twitter is no small site.

Discord: 20.77 MB
I think this is absolutely ridiculous for a chat program, period.

Old Reddit: 6.27 MB
There were quite a lot of thumbnails so I wouldn't blame the old reddit for being bloated. However, it is still kinda big.

New Reddit: 15.66 MB
Okay now let's take the old design and add some bootstrap that more than doubles the transfer sizes.

Facebook: 13.23 MB
Grandma might have some difficulties on dial-up.

GitHub: 2.51 MB
I don't have very many things on my GitHub home, but crazy how it looks nice and pleasing to the eye and yet is only a little bigger than Google.

Roblox: 6.66 MB
This took forever to load because Roblox decided that AJAX was the way to load absolutely everything. Also, very interesting number...

Krunker: 22.88 MB
I don't blame a game being this big but it's interesting to look at nonetheless. Just comparing it to sites that aren't an entire game really makes you wonder if there is a game hidden in those sites.

4Chan /b/: 463.80 KB
I put this here because I think it would be an interesting example of a site that does it's job years after its become "outdated". I didn't do the homepage becaue it's way too small as an example, so I loaded the Random board because hey, images and text and stuff.

And finally,
Worlio: 681.03 KB
And I still think my site is bloated.


The amount of JavaScript, AJAX calls, and crazy stylesheets and resource loading many sites do is just unnecessary. Discord could just as easily exist and be fine if they remade it without their shitty frameworks and bootstrap bloat. GMail taking up that much just to load completely for just EMAILS is insane!

"Okay, so what if they are that big? Most people today have fast internet, not an issue."
The problem is not that they'll load slowly, it's that they don't need to be this big in the first place. Shall I expect websites with home pages that'll load an entire gigabyte in 10 years? Is that really the path we want to go?

Also worth considering that larger files cost more to transmit. Many people are billed for how much bandwidth they use monthly. Just because they can pay for extra doesn't mean they should have to.

If I didn't know any better I'd say some of these companies are deliberately trying to use more data to make you pay more to ISPs that they have control over, but that's entering conspiracy territory and I can't really confirm that.

Developers nowadays are lazy because the higher system resources let them get away with things that would never fly 15 years ago. This also ties into developers becoming less and less skilled overtime as less problems are being solved in order to reach a "good enough" state where a product can be released. There's nothing inherently wrong with something being easier to do, but when that ruins the functional quality of the software, that isn't okay.

Completely disregarding the fact that many of us are multitasking on our machines, or viewing from game consoles and phones with limited memory and battery life, these websites have no regard for performance at all. You have to be a lot more careful with the performance of web content than with native apps because of how complicated running all of it is. Machine code and bytecode are very easy to read for the CPU on the fly, with only a few steps, but Javascript is read in text form and parsed with no machine-friendly conversion at all. Combine this with the extremely polymorphic state of most websites and the fact that browsers are constantly loading new content in, and it's near impossible for the browser to help cut down your code for you. Something that can be done in a couple milliseconds in C++ will take forever with Javascript, and it's because of this that developers should ideally be more considerate of how much processing time they are taking up.

If my beefy 6-core CPU and mid-range gaming graphics card is struggling to run Discord without lagging, there is a problem.

You would think that phone web browsers would be the perfect limitation for website designers to think about speed and layout, but no. They would rather you download another app than make a website readable on mobile. It's almost impossible to read a modern website on a phone now, especially if you don't have a mobile browser with adblock (selection is limited).

Oh my god, this is something I didn't even think about. Yeah, sites on mobile are just garbage. Not to mention that even the apps they want you to download are usually shit too. I get annoyed when looking up something on my phone and end up clicking a reddit link that begs me to use the app. For the longest time, the reddit mobile site wouldn't let you click out of the app popup, meaning use the app or no comments for you.

Native mobile apps are just as bad, many of them are several hundred megabytes for no good reason, and have an unhealthy cache size. God forbid you have a cell phone that's more than a couple of years old.

Mobile games are some of the absolute worst offenders. There is no excuse for a game on my cell phone to be 8 GB. Phones are not PCs.

Internal SSDs and NANDs above 16 GB (in smartphones) only became standard a few years ago, and expandable storage has been killed off on many flagship devices, but app developers still want you to have the latest and most expensive hardware to do anything at all.

I'm moving browsers again. I realized how slow Blink really is when I looked at my profile on it and it stuttered so badly. Tried it on a few Blink browsers and it just was not having it, when the Gecko engine handled it fine.

Went with Waterfox Classic. I hate the modern Firefox, but I always enjoyed the old design. Feels good seeing the grid settings menu and the curved tab edges. Extension support isn't that good since pre-WebExtension but I don't mind that too much.

This is why I don't even bother with a phone. I have no interest in using a mobile device and it's garbage experience in the first place. Literally always a money scam with app developers some how. Oop, can't install more than 3 apps for some silly device you'll keep in your pocket? Buy new phone for couple hundred. I ain't spending a thousand on a phone when it'll go outdated in a few years. Perhaps it's because phones are a constantly evolving tech. Next generation has better camera, better specs, better support for shit. I don't know, I tend to stay away from the mobile market.

was considering switching to waterfox myself, i was always a firefox user (except for sites that literally wouldn't function on it, the only thing worse than everyone using chrome is badly designed sites forcing everyone to use chrome), but there are just signs of worry that they 1) don't know what their users want and 2) aren't taking the competition with chrome seriously enough. i guess i'll stick with it for now but i am eyeing these other options.

For a majority of Chrome-forcing sites, they usually work fine if you have a user agent switcher and set it to Chrome.
I personally use this one: User-Agent Switcher and Manager Add-On for Firefox

Blink doesn't run so badly on my main PC, but on my craptop it's a huge GPU hog. A single backdrop filter will bring the framerate to the low double digits while Gecko can handle several of them just fine on the slower machine.

Decided to go with Waterfox G4. Needed extensions, and G4 seems to keep some of the features I really hated were removed from Firefox. Having issues with WebRTC I believe though.

I would say I have a decent machine, yet it seems every Blink browser just chugs at some special styling. For instance, my profile has an element with a background is slanted and moving. Gecko handles it like a champ, Blink runs at a frame per second with it.

I've noticed that Blink consistently struggles with background effects. Any time something moves in the background it redraws all of it, hence the issue with backdrop-filters for me. Even without any special effects, the FPS will be cut in half if I begin scrolling when the background-attachment is set to fixed.

It's been about three months now, and I've stuck with using Waterfox G4. I have Falkon and Brave installed for other tasks that I require them for, but that's about it. I've been checking browsers and seeing if anything new has come to surface, hoping another WebKit browser that's decent comes around, but nothing yet. I have not much to complain about Waterfox for. It's just Firefox troubles but with a lot of band-aids that make it okay.

I want to mention how much I love the media element rendering for Gecko vs the dumb "modern" Blink look.

Gecko - Well defined, established, and clear. Controls are clearly visible and understandable, and it's play button in the center makes it clear that the media is not playing.


Blink - Modern and faulty. Controls aren't well defined and opt to float instead. Controls such as the volume slider requires hovering over the icon in order to see, making it far less efficient. Could just be a still fool image for all we know.


I've never had a single problem with the way Firefox or the Gecko engine handles media. Blink has constant issues, most involving it's garbage handling of showing the controls on mouse hover. I've had to listen to videos at louder volumes than desired because not only did the person who made it have a hearing issue, Blink won't let me slide the damn volume slider!

So, in conclusion: Waterfox G4 is fine for my needs, keeps features from Firefox that they stupidly remove, and works efficiently. I'm happy with it for now.

The <audio> tag in Chrome looks bulky and doesn't fit in to anything at all, not even the Material UI it was based around.

Oh god it's so damn bulky. Why in the world do you want your audio controls SO DAMN BULKY. Even Webkit/KHTML has a better appearance.

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