True. Unfortunately many large corporate websites through which you pay bills, order tickets, etc. are becoming infested with JS widgets and bulky, slow interfaces. These are hard to avoid.

Conversely no software to install. Browser as a platform. Don’t have to boot to Windows to pay your bills with activex for example

The mostly JS-less web was fine, fast, and reliable 20 years ago and I never had ActiveX.

I hear stories about Flash and ActiveX but I literally never needed these to shop or pay bills online. Payments also didn't require scripts from a dozen domains and four redirects..

Yup, and taking payments online was awful but privacy was more of a thing. In South Korea ActiveX was required until recently. https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/south_korea_activex_c...

The platform isn't the problem. The problem is with the amount of code that does something other than letting you "pay bills, order tickets, etc.".

Huh. A weighted algorithm, somewhere between Google and the one linked, where you could subtract from sites by amount of JavaScript might be interesting.

If one could create an metric of ad to content ratio from the js used, I would guess that would be a nice differentiator too.

Browsers should be cherry picking the most compelling things that people accomplish with complex code and supporting them as a native feature. Maybe the Browser Wars aren’t keeping up anymore.

Was that ever in doubt?