lollynoob I do web development every day for living. And based on my experience I can't agree to several points you make.
The current products are fine.
This depends on how you look at them. Firefox, safari, opera, ... are fine. I like them. They could do with a speedier JavaScript though (both safari and Firefox are working on this and we will see dramatic increases in future releases)
However the biggest problem is IE. Maybe you don't care - but from web developer's point of view it's a nightmare. Code that you spend hours/days working and designing on that is standard compliant, passes all kinds of validations simply fails to work properly on IE. Worse yet there are simple cases to lead IE to crash itself. The only way to pressure Microsoft into compliance is if too many people start moving away from IE. And that is what is happening. In MS's world we would still be stuck with IE4 if there would have been no Firefox/opera/safari around.
Web IS changing a lot. More and more clients come and want to have exciting web site solutions with lot of images, animations, features ... JavaScript is here to stay. Like it or not. If you feel nostalgic go and use Lynx.
But they all show web pages to where the content is readable, right? That's the only important thing, really.
You are free to use ANY browser you like. If I made a website/solution where layout is screwed, half the functionality doesn't work I would not get paid. And probably got fired in the long run. Part of my job is to test my work on many browsers. So no. nowadays it no longer is enough.
Your example only works because there was a reason to improve upon the longbow: a better weapon was needed. My case would be something like "These DVDs work fine as it is, I don't need to switch to blu-ray." In that example, there's really no tangible benefit to the newest technology if you don't really care about seeing the individual blades of grass in a field or whatever the newest technology can do.
I don't understand what is your problem against new things? If you want go back to Mosaic. It is capable of showing text... Perhaps you fail to see/understand that there is entire industry behind and a LOT of competition. Billions of dollars and countless jobs -all for developing and moving the web forward. I as a web developer am very excited over the fact that JavaScript is becoming a more serious tool. This means we can now start doing things on the web that were not possible before.
Personally, I can't stand the "current space," and would be fine with static text web pages.
This is your right. The rest of us like to move into future and see better looking and more functional websites and solutions.
Why is it silly? Security is not that great of a concern for me, and if adding more security (although every new version of a program always seems to have new security vulnerabilities) means changing the interface or how the program works or what the program looks like, I'll take the more risky version any day (for example, I've been running firefox 2 since it came out, don't like how firefox 3 looks, and don't plan on upgrading).
In an imaginary situation if I were to consider employing you to work for me -if you said anything of the like I would refuse. No matter what education/resume/portfolio you got. Security nowadays is paramount. And so do clients -no one likes some ******* hacking into your system and use your mailing list to send out naked Britney Spears, penis enlargement and Viagra. Or sniff on your browser while you visit internet banking, make online payment, ...
Sadly these things happen all the time. There are entire criminal organisations that earn their dirty living this way.
Though there could be a lot of factors involved rather than the browser in general.
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