To me the logical conclusion of what you write is not to write yet-another-web-browser, because browsers are rotten to the core by terrible protocol designs, terrible specifications, politics, greed etc. Browsers did not spontaneously start to degrade, it's what the key actors at different times did that made it happen.
The only hope, IMO, is to build something much more sane that cannot be abused. Something like Gopher or Gemini. Simple specs that make it possible for a single person or a small team to implement something decently working without them spending their like on it like Middle Age monks spent their life mapping and cataloging stars.
I would start with a feature-limited markup language that's good enough to display text - maybe images if you really insist - and leave all media and interactive stuff to external programs; if your browser ends up being a virtual machine and a universal media player, it is doomed to degenerate into a WWW browser if it ever gets popular.
But of course if one builds something that cannot be abused or monetized easily, the big content creators won't be interested. It will take a lifetime or two to gather a critical mass of users, and only if the WWW overloads abuse their power so much that the average WWW serf actively starts to look for a better place to be, and only if at this time the alternative has more and bigger advantages than drawbacks.
I remember first seeing Gemini a while ago, and thought, "cool project, but I probably won't ever use it". And I haven't. If I'd want to build a browser, I want there to be a lot of content for me out there already for me to browse.
It's funny, because I think designing a new protocol and markup language, and then building both server and client software for it, and then actually convincing millions of people to use it... well that sounds orders of magnitude harder than writing a web browser, even with all the crazy and terrible protocols and APIs I'd be expected to build.
And sure, I could set my sights lower and try to build something with much more modest ambitions, only hoping for a few thousands of people to use it -- at most! -- but that doesn't sound interesting to me. I'd still have to use the web for all the other things I need and want to use the web for. Maybe this sort of thing does sound interesting to some people. That's great, go for it!
The problem with gopher, Gemini, etc is a lack of people using the service. The point of a browser is to browse. What are you going to browse if there is nobody creating content? And vice versa, most people won’t put large amounts of time and effort into creating content nobody will see.
Gopher appears to have declined some 20% in content between 2021 and 2022.
I believe I’ve taken a peek at Gemini and there wasn’t much to do either.
The same problem exists for zeronet, i2p, and freenet, which is now apparently two or three separate projects?
Mastodon had a big jump in users when musk bought twitter, which tapered off significantly. They had another, smaller, jump with the Reddit fiasco. Which also tapered off.
But I guess that’s just me rehashing what you said about reaching critical mass.
> But I guess that’s just me rehashing what you said about reaching critical mass.
Yes. But one should remember that some services that are popular today started with a very small user base. Programming languages have to start from one user (starting from zero is orders of magnitude harder - if you are not the first regular user, your project will most likely fail).
One way to achieve that is to have a "killer feature" or maybe a unique combination of existing features. For instance, a subject related to browsers is discoverability and search. If you are going to compete with the WWW without funding or support from companies/institutions, there's little hope that someone will provide a search engine. This means that users will have to pay for that service with their time (that's how Wikipedia emerged). One could think, for instance, about a content tagging system that users could share, to solve this problem.
I was going to suggest something similar. Limit scope to something that is pretty (all of the pdf/ps display model?), but doesn’t support arbitrary code execution or surveillance.
Prodigy (a walled garden network like aol or compuserve) in the US tried to build this in the late 80’s / early 90’s (not with the same motivation—-they were trying to build a terminal with vector graphics for the masses).
For this sort of project, and the emotional reasoning you have for building it, I truly believe less is more.
I prefer the lack of inline display; I would rather it not display the pictures inline in the document anyways. However, that is something that the client does anyways, rather than the server. (Also, I think it does allow inline display if the picture and the document linking to it are both local files (or are both inside of a ZIP archive which is a local file), although even then it should have the option for the user to disable them.)
(Furthermore, it seem to me that Gemini is not a very good protocol for serving a video file anyways, because it does not have Range requests and stuff like that.)
The only hope, IMO, is to build something much more sane that cannot be abused. Something like Gopher or Gemini. Simple specs that make it possible for a single person or a small team to implement something decently working without them spending their like on it like Middle Age monks spent their life mapping and cataloging stars.
I would start with a feature-limited markup language that's good enough to display text - maybe images if you really insist - and leave all media and interactive stuff to external programs; if your browser ends up being a virtual machine and a universal media player, it is doomed to degenerate into a WWW browser if it ever gets popular.
But of course if one builds something that cannot be abused or monetized easily, the big content creators won't be interested. It will take a lifetime or two to gather a critical mass of users, and only if the WWW overloads abuse their power so much that the average WWW serf actively starts to look for a better place to be, and only if at this time the alternative has more and bigger advantages than drawbacks.