ADDED. An argument can be made that my operating system is already a system so complicated or unreliable that it requires its own specialized health-monitoring subsystem (of which Unix commands ps, free and top and OS X's Activity Monitor are a part). My response is that I resent having to deal with two such systems instead of only one.
Although there are text-only web browsers. But there's a reason I don't use them.
An aside... If W3m was as fast as Firefox - I'd most likely use it. Bizarre really as you wouldn't expect it to be slower.
Although I freely concede that making it into an application-delivery platform had large benefits, it also had the adverse effect of making its use for its original purpose more confusing, more frustrating, more tedious, less secure and less reliable, which is a thing to be regretted because there is much utility and promise in its original purpose of giving people a convenient and inexpensive way to publish and consume text, images and links on the internet.
I wish the people who wanted a platform on which to deliver applications over the internet -- a platform neither owned or controlled by any single corporation, which I freely admit was a worthy goal -- had found some other way to get their wish without making so many headaches for the people whose goal is to use the internet to publish or consume text, images and links.
Although it is nice that this second set of people have the opportunity to learn this new health-monitoring subsystem of Firefox, it would have been even better if the software for viewing text and images and for following links were uncomplicated and reliable enough to make a new health-monitoring subsystem unnecessary.
So, to answer your question directly, yes, there is an alternative to viewing websites in a complex, general-purpose browser other than downloading "website" apps to run locally. Namely, it is the alternative that existed in 1994 when web pages were not executable programs. Their being "just plain documents" rather than executable programs drastically limited the kinds of things that could go wrong. Another alternative would to persuade the online publishers of 2013 to move to a new system that does not double as an application-delivery platform and consequently does not suffer the reliability and other problems that the web has. (Yes, I know that is very unlikely to happen.)
May I suggest that if you want to continue this conversation, you switch it to email? My address is in my profile.
