Browser (shall I say the browser?), from "thin client on top of OS" became "web client on top of thin OS that just needed to run the thing". And indeed, zipped

Browser (shall I say the browser?), from "thin client on top of OS" became "web client on top of thin OS that just needed to run the thing". And indeed, zipped Chromium sources are of 1.4 Gb and Linux kernel is of 0.2 Gb - 7 times less. Volume of features that "we" (or rather "they") want to see in browsers and so complexity of browsers reached point of no return I think. From now and on only state actors will be able to finance development of another new browser. I do not think that any private pure product company now is able to develop modern browser sustainably. Either we (users) shall pay to the company for it or the company shall sell telemetry, user's data, influence user choice, etc. to get money for that from FAANG & Co. And that is exactly what happens now with Mozilla. What to do? The solution could be in drastically limiting the scope of browser. Indeed, 95% of sites and users just need basic HTML/CSS/JS features. The only thing that needs to be added is what I name as WebVM - virtual machine a la JavaVM or .NET "VM" with DOM and CSSOM exposed in it as primitives. So if you want to add new CSS, HTML feature or to support new script language then you can provide corresponding loadable .class (bytecodes) file. I mean: compact base (bootstrap) implementation + VM/runtime to extend this thing. All other features can be developed independently by teams who need them for their users and cases. All those WebGL, WebAsm, rarely used CSS effects and HTML features ... 95% of us do not need them - why do we need to pay the price for these features? If someone will need them - fine, design and load them into WebVM. As an example, I (+ 3more devs) can transform my Sciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com, 0.02 Gb zipped sources) into such bootstrap browser in 6-9 months. And so can do other teams. Sigh. 10 years ago we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we disabled ActiveX, Java, etc. Instead we should actually develop WebVM and so to move web tech development out of big companies and Central Comity of the Web.