I don’t think you need all that for the important stuff.

But other people think different of "important stuff" thats why it is there.

And those who really want only simple HTMl rendering, I believe there are lightweight alternatives (?).

And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

> And if not, well then maybe there is simply not enough demand, because most people apparently want to be able to have a email client in the browser and do online banking, or edit Wikipedia articles in a rich html editor, or play games, or watch videos and share and comment them or even do video editing, ... all in the browser.

IMO they largely just want to do all these things in an open core VM, without risking installing malware on the ridiculously insecure proprietary OS most of them use if/when they use desktop computers.

Well yes and currently there is no alternative to a webbrowser which needs a lot of RAM for these tasks ... which was the main point, right? And not that we could do much better in theory. No doubt about that. But reality is the browser is usually the most pragmatic solution right now to most use cases. Which is good, when I can do online banking in a very niche project like pine, or do you think banks would port and certify their apps for the various linux distros?

I wonder if we could grade how much better a current system is vs something like the QNX 1.44MB demo disk.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

Thats easy: does the qnx meets the requirement of a modern browser?

No, then it is not.

Or do you mean in academical sense of functionaliy per byte? How useful is that?

Not to mention video.