[takluyver]

People object to the massive effort it takes to create or maintain a browser engine which can practically browse the modern web. We're down to 3 players now actually trying to do this (Mozilla, Google, Apple). It conflicts with the idea that you can fork software if you dislike what it's doing, because even starting from existing code, it would be a lot of work to keep up with changes so you don't get left behind.

So people imagine splitting off a simpler web, where the main focus is on reading documents, rather than interactive applications, and browsers could be much simpler. But it's pretty hard to see how this could actually work in practice.

[yakubin]

There are many distinct PDF readers. Making a document browser shouldn't be more complicated than making a PDF reader. PDF readers is how it works in practice.

[takluyver]

I guess the issue is that a modern web browser is a sandboxed application runtime which also happens to function as a document browser. It's been going in that direction for a long time (since webmail became common), and there are real advantages of the browser as a platform for applications - it's cross platform by default, and it has pretty good sandboxing.

So probably the most you can hope for is that we split the document part of the web from the application part, so that it's easier to make a viable document browser. But it's not clear what advantage this offers for anyone who's not trying to make their own browser. Security is probably much simpler for the document browser, but the logins and sensitive data you care about securing are probably in the application browser anyway. And we've spent the last 20 years blurring the lines between documents and applications (think of a Github issue page, for instance), so even if it was possible to access information as a pure document, there would be advantages to looking at it in an application browser.