A lot of the development efforts (both creative and destructive) in web browsers in the last decade+ has been going into fostering the “web app” vision of the web, to the detriment of the “web of documents” vision. From the removal of native support for #RSS and #Atom to the introduction of JavaScript APIs like #WebUSB or the “Web Environment Integrity” attempt, nearly all work done on browsers has been in this direction.
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This difference isn't just a matter of feature sets; in fact, it's primarily a matter of _design principles_.
A browser for the “web of documents” is a User Agent: it's a tool in the hands of users designed to maximize the usability of said documents.
A browser for the “web of apps” is a Corporate Agent: it's a too in the hands of *corporation* designed to maximize the control *they* have on the user machine.
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One can obviously see how this reflects in the development of Chrome with the removals of features that are unnecessary or, even worse, *detrimental* to corporate interests (the most famous recent such change is the introduction of the so-called Manifest v3 for WebExtensions to kill ad blockers), but you can also see in Firefox development when their “listening to the community” means doubling down on shoving unwanted genAI support everywhere and dropping XSLT.
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