I feel like the Web is evolving too fast right now for this kind of things to happen. It's already ridiculously hard to keep up with all the innovation, so ther

I feel like the Web is evolving too fast right now for this kind of things to happen. It's already ridiculously hard to keep up with all the innovation, so there is no time to stop and reflect and build a browser from scratch with a clean and modular design. Maybe it will happen once something different than the Web takes off. To add to your specifications: a "programer's web browser" should communicate with the user in a way which assumes that the user is knowledgeable. It should not use ridiculous metaphors like "this site could harm the computer! back to safety" or noob-oriented advice like "check the address for typing errors", but tell me things like "this URL is registered as a phishing site in such and such blacklist", "access to this site would violate an STS policy", "no DNS record for this domain, here is the result of the lookup", "no reply from IP A.B.C.D, here is a traceroute", etc. My current choice of a keyboard-oriented browser is Firefox with the pentadactyl extension. It's not perfect, but better than anything else I've tried (including uzbl, which doesn't seem mature or well-documented enough).