As fast as the web is now, I’m no-longer a fan of pressuring browser developers on performance. What we really need is to improve browser interoperability.
Rendering engines are constantly adding support for awesome new features… but those features can’t really be used until all the other browsers decide to implement the same feature - which tends to be years later. I’m a huge fan of the “Interop” project, which maintains a list of web technologies everyone agrees should be cross platform and pressures rendering engines to implement those features. The list of features changes every year.
I’m for both. A bit of pressure to avoid bloat and smoothly handle occasionally stressful situations is a good thing.
Most of this bloated is caused by actual websites, not browsers
The features are the bloat.
Websites couldn’t use 1,000x the cycles the content warrants for the sole purpose of spying on users if browsers didn’t let them run arbitrary code.
You obviously never browsed the web with jQuery javascript-based animations in 2006.