>>17821
>plain text
Degeneracy. The written word was meant to enjoy maximum readability and beauty, with properly styled fonts, multi-character glyphs such as ligatures, optical kerning, and proper columnation. Any existing compromises from the zenith of hand illuminated script are exactly that, temporary accommodations for primitive technology in the evolution of print and computing.
>Lynx or Mosaic
That's kinda' my point. Those were browsers, they displayed hypertext documents, which is still the only thing modern browsers are designed to do (this is, now that I think about it, actually even truer than it was, since there was a fad in the midlife of the web for "browser suites" where web browsers like Netscape Communicator were integrated with clients for eMail, USENET, FTP, IRC, AIM, etc.) without JS or serverside dynamic generation.
In the past, there was other software (the better ones using other standard APIs and formats) for other apps of the time, like file transfer, chat, database access, AV viewing, etc., but all of those have now been forced inside the browser, where they must exist by pretending to be HTML/CSS hypertext documents. The only one that still exists as the dominant independent standard for its application is IMAP/SMTP/POP eMail, and even that is mostly used through webmail interfaces in a browser rather than a native clientside app.
This is even extending beyond the Internet, where normal clientside apps like office suites and image editors are being turned into web apps.
The situation is even more dire for apps that didn't exist back then, such as eCommerce, decentralized filesharing, cryptocurrency, remote desktop, collaborative authoring, forums, instant messaging, and teleconferencing, where they are stillborn directly into a web browser without any kind of public backend API or format ever being created.
A final problem is modern users habituated and sometimes even directly cautioned against installing anything on their computer other than a web browser (deeply ironic, considering modern curated repos and app stores exist specifically to assuage this concern). This makes the problem even harder to fix, even if most "native apps" weren't themselves also just webapps in some Electron-type wrapper, typically also tied to some centralized remote server by a closed private API, even on platforms (i.e.: phones) with unreliable network access.
If, like in the past, people only used HTTP/HTML/CSS/JS for hypertext documents, and other APIs/formats narrowly optimized for other specific applications, then the speed and reliability of the past would also return.
>>17820
Can (you) do better?