I've only just had time to glance at this paper and I've already found it to be very informative. There are types of web operations that I've not much need for so I've long advocated that it would be good if there were ways of either rendering them inoperative or depreciating certain aspects of their operation for the purposes of either improving user privacy/security or improving the browser's performance.

In particular, the JavaScript engine could be modified in ways that would allow it to be tailored to the user's requirements such as to improve the speed of the rendering of web pages by having it ignore the huge amounts of dross/bloat that's now found in a large percentage of of web pages. Same would apply to user privacy, JS could be tweaked to either ignore certain requests for privacy-sapping info or where necessary spoof them with quasi-random junk ('quasi-random' here refers to data that's inaccurate but its format and structure still satisfies any validity checks the server may perform). The same philosophy applies to other aspects of browser operation that I won't bother to cover here.

To do this clearly requires a detailed understanding of the browser's complex operations and that's not easy for someone—even a good programmer—who only approaches a browser's internal functions as a means to an end to quickly change some facet of its operation.

It seems from what I've read so far, this paper could initiate new more detailed work and or lead to the development of tools that would make browser tailoring much easier and simpler.