Exactly. A simple phone that runs a browser I can trust that's also capable of running web-based apps is all I need. I already avoid running apps on my iphone whenever possible.

The phone I really want is as uncomplicated and open as possible and beholden to no corporate economic interests or privacy invasions.

Now that I'm retired I'm looking for a project to immerse myself in. This sounds like just the ticket.

It depends on what definition of "uncomplicated" you'll assume, but that's pretty much how I perceive my Librem 5. It's fairly inspectable and relatively easy to understand as a computing device - no weird stuff like hundreds of disk partitions that you can't touch without risking bricking the phone like on Qualcomm devices, but a fairly regular GNU/Linux installation with well-defined boundaries on what's open and what's not - and it runs web apps pretty well. I have things like my bank, public transit planner, ride-hailing, webmail, RSS reader, Matrix client, package delivery status, even Facebook & Messenger for the handful of people that can still be only reached there - all "installed" as web apps using Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). Some of them required a bit of fiddling to discover which user-agent leads to a usable experience, but the results have been pretty good so far. In case I really need to run some Android app for some reason, I can boot Waydroid up and launch it there, though I use it very rarely. No corporate economic interests, no privacy invasions, no invasive notifications or ads, it simply works the way I want it to work. I just have to be careful with battery usage, but it's manageable :)

Actually "open" is a misnomer, maybe it was a decade ago but it's clear that Big G has an effective monopoly over browser(s), the web "standards", and is gradually making them more user-hostile.

It's still significantly more open than any other platform. Believe it or not, Mozilla is not asleep at the wheel, and neither is Apple.

I use Safari as my daily driver and I'm still routinely shocked at just how terrible certain aspects of the experience is compared to Chrome. For example, the UI seems to completely block for most of the website loading process, rather than streaming as Chrome does. Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch. Little things like this continue to annoy me day by day, the primary reason I don't switch to Chrome is because it just doesn't integrate with macOS at all.

Well, Safari caches resources, it just doesn't seem to cache the actual runtime state of the page like Chrome does (look for bfcache). The bfcache article claims Safari and Firefox do it too, but I have both in front of me and no they don't (or it's not good enough).

I think real caching is superior because you can manually reload if you actually needed that, but you can't go in the other direction.

I've never used safari but to be fair to Firefox: I haven't experienced either on desktop. When I go back, the page loads instantly. I haven't checked the network tab but I'm assuming it's not doing a new request.

Something Safari does is show a stale version of the webpage while the updated version is loading. I notice because none of my pointer movements take effect until the page finishes loading again. I'm not sure if Firefox does this too.

Mozilla is absolutely asleep at the wheel (and have arguably already swerved off the road and hit a tree) and Apple aren't any better than Google in terms of wanting to lock down the web.