> I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant.

Take a trip only 10 years back. Browse with a Wii, or a series 40 Nokia phone. Or even Lynx using a color terminal. The experience bears considerable resemblance to the one you describe.

Everything pulling the experience away from this is a cultural problem. On the technical side there's the increasing tendency to see the browser as a weird VM/runtime first (or, worse, not to think about the browser much at all, and instead see the web primarily through the lens of several popular technological hammers to which every problem looks like a nail). On the business side there's various legal, economic, and marketing incentives. Not all of these are trivially dismissed concerns, but it's still possible to do what you want in simple enough circumstances or with some careful thinking/work in more complex ones.

I'm going to get flamed for this but, if all you're interested in is the text, you could do worse than Lynx. I mean, it's not pretty, but it does get to the point. For sites that absolutely require JavaScript to load content you're screwed, but it does a surprisingly decent job on many others. Can be helpful if you need to avoid becoming distracted.

I actually used text based browsers as my main thing for a few weeks, when I had really bad internet. Ran it thru ssh on a VPS, much faster that way. I found the w3m browser gave the best formatting and mouse support.

When I have a slow internet connection I use the Dillo browser with CSS and image loading disabled. Dillo is also really snappy even on an old computer.

https://www.dillo.org/

Coming from a much more graphical background, Links always seemed easier for me than Lynx.

Not sure if Links is the same as ELinks.

I'd use ELinks or Links2 over Links, AFAIK the originall Links is no longer maintained. There's also partial JS support in ELinks which fixes some sites that require it.

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite sturdy job.

In college I had one of those eeePC netbooks. It came with Windows XP on it, but it was so underpowered it couldn't really run a browser, so I threw headless Ubuntu onto it and got briefly good with emacs. I tried a few different console browsers; as I recall elinks was slightly better than lynx, but you could get most of the content you wanted back then, at least. I suspect that a large portion of the web is completely useless if you are still trying to use those browsers now.

I still have one of the original models that came with its own version of Linux. It worked really well with Fluxbox but unfortunately that's no longer being supported, it's currently running Puppy Linux.

Lynx is good! I also use the Links browser, a sort of a successor to Lynx.

> I feel this is what I'd like the modern web to be: crisp, clean, high density information, using colors only where it is relevant.

Most people want images. Most people want more than images, they want video.

You just need to look at news sites, the main Reddit page or the Facebook feed of a regular person.

What techies want is far removed from what the majority of people want.

Similar story with free products (regular people) and privacy (techies).

I don't believe that this is true.

What's true is that images & video are effective distractors, and most content "servers" want impressions and ad clicks. I don't think this means that most visitors/readers are necessarily looking for image-/video-heavy content.

The likes of Youtube, etc. may be an exception (where it's clear people have come to the site looking specifically for a video), but even there, the suggested videos sidebar, etc. are not things that visitors necessarily ask for/want, but rather things that benefit advertisers in terms of user attention.

This idea that techies are a different species to "normal people" is an overused red herring. Of course every user/demographic has their different preferences, but generally speaking the only difference with "techies" in this particular instance is awareness: due to familiarity with the medium, they are more deliberate in what they want—and more conscious of image-/video-heavy content being a distraction from what they're looking for—than the average user. This doesn't necessarily mean they're actually looking for different things.

Advertisers go to where people are, not the other way around.

People didn't want MySpace, but they don't want HackerNews, either. They want Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit.

I think it's about time we accept that. People want colors, want animations, want life.

Bland, static and lifeless is as annoying to them as super colorful and dynamic.

I'd suggest that people go where people are. They probably do want life and would likely be happier if they were interacting with other real live people. But our society is increasingly fragmented with people with good jobs being forced to work all the time and people with bad jobs being forced to work irregular hours and the people with stable reasonable jobs shrinking. This is probably just one factor that leads people to try to socialize online and thus seek a simulacrum of authentic experience which leaves them lacking often in comparison to what a real life experience would be. People who are seeking utility or information through the Internet are less inclined to desire distractions, but people who are seeking distractions or entertainment are probably more inclined towards shiny. The challenge we face is that all human activity is being pushed into the domain of a surveillance panopticon house of mirrors where even people seeking to interact with other people face to face are required to participate lest they be disinvited. This is specific to things like Facebook groups and events to coordinate activities. But yeah advertisers do follow people and they also help corral people by feeding social media companies into places so they have a captive audience.

> using colors only where it is relevant.

That image lacks color because it is from a monochrome display. Early NeXT computers used four-bit monochrome displays (i.e. 16 shades of gray).