During the writing of this entire article, I have made a certain assumption. That browsing the modern web is worth it and a browser must have full compatibility with it. But maybe it is this assumption that needs questioning in the first place. When you have this requirement, you suddenly become dependent on one of the big evil corporations (Apple, Google or Mozilla) - which are the only ones who have enough manpower to be able to sustain the engines that support the web standards fully. In fact, the standards themselves are now unashamedly controlled by the same corporations that develop the major browsers. No conflict of interest there, at all. Of course, the goal is to make the standards so complex that an independent browser developer cannot stand a chance of implementing them, and so the internet user must settle on one of the big corpo browsers. The Pale Moon devs tried to avert this, but did not manage to do it completely, so compatibility issues still exist with some sites. But is this actually a disadvantage?
The websites have gotten way too complex for their own good, and we shouldn't seek full compatibility with them. I was hoping really hard that the Pale Moon devs would go against the trend of including everything possible and at least deny WebAsm, but of course they ended up cucking. It's not just WebAsm, either; new standards include a lot of complicated stuff that's useless, violates privacy (e.g CSS media queries), makes websites slower, kills compatibility with older browsers and / or makes code way harder to understand for someone who wants to learn web development. I mean, you can't honestly tell me that this abomination (local) is somehow desirable! During the development of modern web browsers, no one bothered to ask themselves what do we want them to actually do? No, they just jumped into the feature train, went full speed ahead and rammed into a brick wall. Now all that remains from the Web is a pile of rubble from the crash.
But the train's still chugging along. Those corporations won't hold themselves back and will keep inventing more crap. Since they control both the standards and the major browsers, webdevs feel no inhibitions in including all the new technology on their sites. A popular VPN company even told me in an E-mail that they "won't support those outdated browsers" - refering to Pale Moon, which despite being separate from the Google / Mozilla duopoly (really a monopoly), is still a modern browser. One way we can attempt to fix the situation is by making sites that promise to be compatible with all browsers. However, I feel like these days, that might be not quite enough. That site appears quite dated in that it refers to Netscape and IE as if they were still the top dogs. A regular person will also probably misunderstand the campaign since they assume "all browsers" just means Chrome, Firefox and perhaps Safari. Eventually we have to say "no!", and start making and using browsers that are less compatible (support less new crap) on purpose (and not just because we lack manpower to reach the ideal of full compatibility). This will also put pressure on webdevs to design their websites more sanely. Again, I thought Pale Moon might have been that browser, but it didn't turn out that way.
What should be supported and what should be discarded? I don't know. That remains to be decided - but no one even asks that question today, believing full compatibility with big corpo standards to be the unquestionable ideal. I cannot anymore pretend that that is the case, though, and that minor browser differences are a big deal. And compared to the compatibility issue, every other feature is minor. Today's "minimal" browsers are not even "minimal" - they just lack an UI and extension support, with the decidedly not minimal Blink or Webkit under the hood. Sometimes people mention NetSurf as a viable alternative; forget it - despite being independent, it blindly hopes to absorb all of WhatWG's abomination:
There are many web standards. HTTP, HTML and CSS are just a few of them, and new specifications appearing all the time. The NetSurf team is devoted to implementing these standards.
On the other hand, a truly "minimal" browser would proudly reject useless modern "features". NetSurf doesn't care and already includes the CSS spy queries, for example - with the other stuff coming up. If you are dead set on the modern web, Pale Moon is still the best option available. But long term, our only option is a rejection of the modern web and the creation of our own, at least if sanity is a goal. I will still leave up this comparison of modern browsers, since there are significant enough differences to warrant consideration. The section Why "minimalist" browsers suck still applies, since "minimal" browsers only work for a "minimal" web.