i was thinking about the reader view feature in ios safari and how surprisingly well it works with a lot of sites despite tremendous efforts to block it, and thinking about gemini and how it never really took off due the insanely tall order of expecting people to create a whole new world wide web from scratch in the 2020s, and how all the old text-mode web browsers are ancient and don't work with much of the modern web, and how writing a new web browser from scratch is basically impossible now if you're not a huge corporation with billions of dollars, and how all these "stealth browser" projects like brave are shady as fuck, and how headless web browsers are basically a lost cause with web developers (scum of the earth) constantly figuring out new ways to spy on users and block anything that doesn't look like a real desktop browser, i had a crazy idea:
what about a web browser that silently launches a qemu snapshot of alpine linux running firefox or chromium (with adblock and paywallbypassclean) to render a page and save it to the host, then kills the vm and generates a simple html text-only version of the page? most modern cpus have virtualization acceleration and qemu could use whatever vm acceleration is available on the host os like kvm or whpx or whatever so the rendering ought to be pretty quick, the vm snapshot already has the os and firefox running in a frozen a state so no waiting for it to boot up, and it wouldn't be detected as a headless browser because it's just regular desktop firefox/chromium. just a thought.