See also: "minimalist web browser" and the history of Firefox :) https://en.wiki...

TheLoneWolfling · on June 25, 2015

Try: the web itself.

The amount you need to be able to do to just load a basically-plaintext webpage now is absurd.

knodi123 · on June 25, 2015

that's a really good point. I used to browse http over telnet because my boss couldn't tell I wasn't hard at work. Needless to say, I can no longer do that.

jerf · on June 25, 2015

Yup, that one was certainly big for a while! KHTML and its whole menagerie of browsers competing to be more "minimal" than the last.

I think the web has stabbed that one dead, though... ship a proper HTML5-compliant browser engine, and, well, you're already looking at a whackload of startup time and tons of functionality. The size of the chrome is hardly an afterthought nowadays. A really "minimal" browser can hardly browse the top-ten sites anymore.

(Wikipedia's still looking pretty good in Lynx, though... just checked.)

oblio · on June 25, 2015

http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html

My all time favorite reply about bloat: "X is big because your needs are big" (in the article X = Mozilla).