Sites like Facebook, Gmail, or Google maps are slow and bloated, yet the backend servers have features and data which are very useful.

Could we crowdsource an effort to build a new frontend, using the same backend API's (both public and private API's, which for most sites are quite straightforward).

I'm imagining making a browser extension which has replacements for all the html/javascript/css URL's to make a nice lightweight minimal UI for each site, and a button to revert to the original UI incase you need a feature not available in the minimal UI. For example the youtube minimal UI would let you watch videos, but revert to the original UI for uploading videos.

The entire effort could be crowdsourced, perhaps via a big github repo that UI's are pulled from, and users can choose which repo they want to use.

The crowdsourcing would hopefully mean that patches to keep up with API changes can be done in a timely manner, and if it gets popular enough websites will come under pressure not to change their API's without notice.