[jrockway]

I don't really see how encoding a DNS request as HTTP gives extra power to browsers. What power do they gain by writing "GET www.example.com" after a TLS handshake with port 443 versus writing "1234 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 ..." after a handshake with port 53?

Browsers can already do whatever they want to the URL you type in. What DNS packets look like does not add or remove any power.

Meanwhile, https isn't exactly heavy, and it's very well supported by everything. Every programming language has an https library. Writing an DNS-over-HTTPS program will be 3 lines of code.