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   tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 06:37:32 JST tante

   Firefox should really strip down the browser to the core, make that performant and secure. Maybe even improve extension interfaces and then deliver whatever "AI" nonsense they want through extensions. Would make it so easy to stop having to talk about kill switches and how "hard" those are. Offer people all the slop extensions in the world and see who will download them.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 08:43:24 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @tante The "browsers are too hard to make a new one from scratch" narratives are premised on misunderstanding the scope and nature of what a browser is/should-be.

     Fundamentally, a browser is a javascipt+DOM virtual machine with an access control model. Nearly everything else needed can be modeled (and much even implemented) as components running on that substrate.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 08:56:32 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Orman

     @orman @tante Rendering is a big deal, but it's not *core* to what a browser is. It's presentation layer. Traditional browsers treated it as core and the virtual machine as something bolted-on, and that makes things a lot harder.

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     Orman (orman@furry.engineer)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 08:56:33 JST Orman

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @tante I thought "browsers are too hard to make new from scratch" was a matter of e.g. rendering the DOM and CSS together being so complex and fiddly that it needed a large team to be achievable rather than the larger architectural choices of how that view is encapsulated