The 10-Kilobyte Web Browser

In theory, browsing the Web is safe: click a link, and if you don’t like what you see, click “close” and it disappears forever. In practice, this guarantee doesn’t hold, because the browser is complex in both implementation and specification. We designed and built an alternate Web app delivery model in which the client-side interface specification and code—the pieces that replace the browser—are extremely simple, yet can run applications even richer than today’s JavaScript apps. This article describes how we achieve this goal, and suggests a path forward into a future free of today’s bloated browser interface.