I wish for this new year we reboot the Web with a super light standard and accompanying ecosystem with

    - A small and efficient JS subset, HTML, CSS
    - A family of very simple browsers that do just that
    - A new Web that adheres to the above

This would never happen because there's zero incentive to do this.

Browsers are complex because they solve a complex problem: running arbitrary applications in a secure manner across a wide range of platforms. So any "simple" browser you can come up with just won't work in the real world (yes, that means being compatible with websites that normal people use).

Lots of comments talking about how existing browsers can already do this, but the big benefit that current browsers can't give you is the sheer level of speed and efficiency that a highly restricted "lite web" browser could achieve, especially if the restrictions are made with efficiency in mind.

The embedded use case is obvious, but it'd also be excellent for things like documentation — with such a browser you could probably have a dozen+ doc pages open with resource usage below that of a single regular browser tab. Perfect for things that you have sitting open for long periods of time.

While we're wishing, can we split CSS into two parts - styling and layout? Also, I'd like to fix the spelling on the "referer" header...

There could be a way: This HTML-lite spec would be subset of current standard so that if you open this HTML lite page in normal browser it would still work. but HTML-lite browser would only open HTML-lite sites, apart from tech itch it could be used in someplace where not full browser is needed, especially if you are control content generation. - TV screens UI - some game engines embed chrome embed thing ( steam store page kind) - some electron apps / lighter cross platform engine - less sucky QML - i think weechat or sth has own xml bashed app froamework thing (so could be useful to people wanting to build everything app app platform - much richer markdown format ?

What about https://geminiprotocol.net/

And also bring back progressive enhancement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Years ago I wrote a tiny xhtml-basic browser for a job. It was great. Some of my best work. But then the iPhone came out and xhtml-basic died practically overnight.

So you want 2026 to be the year of Google AMP?

Not likely to happen. There is geminiprotocol with gemtext though for those of us that are fine with that level of simplicity.

Work towards an eventual feature freeze and final standardisation of the web would be fantastic though, and a huge benefit to pretty much everyone other than maybe the Chrome developers.

I would actually merge html and js in a single language and bring the layout part of css too (something like having grid and flexbox be elements themselves instead of display styles, more typst kind of showed this is possible in a nice way) and keep css only for the styling part.

Or maybe just make it all a single lispy language

Do it, man. Call it "MicroWeb" or whatever. Write an agent, make it "viewable with regular browsers". I think this could be cool.

I can't think of an instance of the web contracting like that. Maybe when Apple decided not to support Adobe Flash.

Would be cool to create a MicroBrowser, just to browser stuff that's compatible.

You mean like the piece of crap that was WAP?

I think there needs to be a split between the web browser as a document renderer and link follower, and the web browser as a portable target for GUI applications. But frankly my biggest gripe is that you need HTML, JS, and CSS. Three distinct languages that are extremely dissimilar in syntax and semantics that you need all three of (or some bastard cross compiler for your JSX to convert from one format to them). Just make a decent scripting language and interface for the browser and you don't need that nonsense.

I understand this has been tried before (flash, silverlight, etc). They weren't bad ideas, they were killed because of companies that were threatened by the browser as a standard target for applications.

You can already create websites to these standards. Then truncate large parts of webkit and create a new browser. Or base it on Servo.

I mean, you can do all that now, so that's not the problem. The problem would be convincing millions of people to switch, when 99.99999% of them couldn't care less.

And if you find you need more features than that - just build an app, don't make the web browser into some overly bloated app!