Yes, most of the web will flat out not work without js. Especially the bit that has lots of users and commerce going on. If your target audience is hermits that don't engage socially online, that don't buy stuff online, and that are stuck in a time bubble in the late nineties when they were young and naive (talking about myself here as well), then this might be the best thing ever. But forget about getting a younger or wider audience showing any interest for this. The web is a content first platform. Interest is content driven, not technology driven. That's why web technology is such a dog's breakfast of meh.
I get the idealism, sentiment, and nostalgia. But the web has always been a mediocre platform, a straight jacket, a bit of a terribly disgraceful kludge. Fixing it by crippling it further doesn't make it better.
The good news is that there are other ways forward. I like what's happening with WASM. WASM fixes browsers to be suitable for running any kind of code. There are some silly examples out there of browsers running emulators with legacy operating systems running a 25 year old browser. Or stuff like winamp. But the main point is that we're no longer restricted to using javascript/css/html. We can now use pretty much any language, any framework, any kind of rendering engine. Browsers can now run hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
Browsers as a virtualization platform are rapidly catching up with Sun's vision of thin client computing a quarter century ago. And just around the same time that the web is rapidly expanding across devices and modalities. Mobile, AR/XR/VR, entertainment consoles, etc.
Browsers are backwards in the sense that they started with a very limited/crippled platform that was then extended slowly and haphazardly over the course of nearly 35 years with enough technology that you can run pretty much anything inside them now.
A more logical architecture would be to start with a minimal VM that is powerful enough to run anything you'd want to run and then run all the rest inside (including legacy crap like CSS/HTML/JS, Flash and all the rest.). Sun had some of the right ideas but got hung up on the wrong technologies.
With it you can use it to browse most websites. And these that don't work you can open it in a regular browser. There is even a plan to have integration of CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) that allows to use the full browser experience for a specific tab or website directly from FixBrowser.
I've been using this approach for the last few years with good results.
I get the idealism, sentiment, and nostalgia. But the web has always been a mediocre platform, a straight jacket, a bit of a terribly disgraceful kludge. Fixing it by crippling it further doesn't make it better.
The good news is that there are other ways forward. I like what's happening with WASM. WASM fixes browsers to be suitable for running any kind of code. There are some silly examples out there of browsers running emulators with legacy operating systems running a 25 year old browser. Or stuff like winamp. But the main point is that we're no longer restricted to using javascript/css/html. We can now use pretty much any language, any framework, any kind of rendering engine. Browsers can now run hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
Browsers as a virtualization platform are rapidly catching up with Sun's vision of thin client computing a quarter century ago. And just around the same time that the web is rapidly expanding across devices and modalities. Mobile, AR/XR/VR, entertainment consoles, etc.
Browsers are backwards in the sense that they started with a very limited/crippled platform that was then extended slowly and haphazardly over the course of nearly 35 years with enough technology that you can run pretty much anything inside them now.
A more logical architecture would be to start with a minimal VM that is powerful enough to run anything you'd want to run and then run all the rest inside (including legacy crap like CSS/HTML/JS, Flash and all the rest.). Sun had some of the right ideas but got hung up on the wrong technologies.