Jonathan Blow

The job of engineers is to solve problems. If those problems don't get solved, it is because people didn't solve them.

It's not an engineering problem. You can write an amazing new browser tomorrow, but if it doesn't display 90% of the web pages properly, and doesn't handle accessibility and different device types/screens, nobody will keep using it. How do you get people to adopt that?

I mean for the sake of the argument, lets forget about compatibility for a moment, say through some miracle this new browser just works, or at least with most modern pages. You still have to convince people to switch. "It's better" doesn't work, ask Mozilla.

Only if the switch is discontinuous. It is actually not that hard, given WASM etc, to envision a series of transformations that, for example, removes JS from the browser entirely. It only requires will.

Once you remove JS from the browser, now the Web is no longer based on an error-prone slow programming language, so it's a lot more natural for people to choose higher-quality languages (as opposed to hacks on top of JS like TypeScript).

Then once you have real programming languages, why do you have all this DOM stuff and wtf is CSS for anyway, just let peoples' code lay out the text, and get rid of all that junk.

“Wtf is CSS for” just about sums this up

If you don’t understand how awful and embarrassing CSS is, it’s going to be very difficult for me to figure out anything else to say. I can just refer you to: