Web browsing in 1993 -> EASY
Web browsing in 2003 -> Damn bat guano insanely difficult.
Why? Take a look at the source for most web pages these days... Flash, Java, VBScript, extensions... there are countless issues to navigate around just to display a single page correctly. Let's not even get to the notion of fetching data through firewalls and proxies. Let's not get into the notion of supporting web forms and the HTML UI functionality.
- and when somebody does do it, everybody will cry about how it doesn't support this, or it doesn't support that... or how broken some pages look.
Writing a web browser these days is a proposition akin to writing a Windows clone (backwards compatible with existing software). You need a good size development team, set requirements, test procedures, etc. It's just not a simple task.