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by chakhs 1612 days ago
Why stop at browsers, the OS is a dependency for your app too
2 comments

Essential vs accidental complexity.

Most content on the web is static text, audio, and video, and shouldn't need a Rube Goldberg virtual machine to consume. I've been advocating splitting the web into the "document web" (ie the web as it was originally conceived) and the "app web" (which is cool and useful but a different thing) for a while now. There should be two different programs for consuming them.

And to your point, if simple web browsers became useful again, maybe simple operating systems would be viable once more, further reducing the dependencies involved.

Not really. The set of systems calls needed to run your app is usually very small and precisely specified.