This article has some interesting ideas, and it's definitely true that the web has a lot of problems, but I'm not sure how much of it is actually related to the

This article has some interesting ideas, and it's definitely true that the web has a lot of problems, but I'm not sure how much of it is actually related to the underlying technology. Sites that use a lot of javascript tend to fall into one of two categories: * News sites with a billion ads and tracking scripts. * Actual web apps (Google Docs, Gmail, etc). For the first category of websites, it's basically an economic problem - sites are including all this junk because it makes money. If this proposal were implemented, most sites would just find ways to work around it - and if you can send network requests in response to events, it's always going to be possible to track users. You could easily just send a network request every time something on the page is clicked, hovered over, etc. and doing that would likely be even less efficient than what we have today. The article mentions alerting people when a network request is made, but if you had to click a button every time a site wanted to make a network request, it would be so annoying that most people would just give up and go back to the old web. Ultimately, the only way to stop tracking is to somehow fix the economic model so that there's no incentive to do it, although it's not entirely clear how that would happen. For the second category of things that are real apps, this system is probably not going to work in most cases. There's a practically infinite number of actions that a real app would need to do, and if you implement an API for every single one, you'd end up with something that's really similar to what we have today. Most likely, you would just go back to downloading and installing native apps, which provides even less security protections than a web browser does (and it also makes it much harder to distribute your apps, which is the whole reason the web won in the first place). Rather than getting rid of javascript completely, I think there's a few things that we could do that would solve a lot of the problems present today: * Create a way for sites to easily accept micropayments so that there's an alternative to ads. Brave seems to be the only company attempting this right now; it will be interesting to see whether they succeed or not. * Have your web browser notify you if a site is using too many resources. Firefox already kind of has this with the "x is slowing down your browser" notification, something like "x has used 100MB of data. Stop loading?" would work really well. * Enable first-party isolation by default, which would do a lot to reduce cross-site tracking.