Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#241

Post by TheLoneWolfling » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 1:50 AM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #235

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #151

No antifeatures / downgrades. I am aware that this is a fuzzy concept. However, a few specifics: * Think very hard before adding things to make sure that they actually need to be in the core browser. Looking at you, FF Hello. * Don't baby the user. Everything should be configurable. And existing options should not be changed on upgrades. And general solutions are (always) better than centralized services. Looking at…

Sorry, but I'm going to call this arbitrary FF hate. With the exception of the Pocket and Hello arguments, Chrome has all of these problems. Electrolysis, the malware stuff, etc... all comes from Chrome stuff!

It's not arbitrary FF hate. It's frustration that the browser that I used because it didn't have any of these problems has decided to emulate the antifeatures of a browser that I don't use because it does have these problems.

As you said, it all comes from Chrome. Well... Guess why I don't use Chrome. And guess why I've switched away from mainline FF.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#242

Post by arh68 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

POST support from the URL bar. Let me type in POST bodies and edit Content-Type/User-Agent/etc headers by hand.

Show TLS negotiation in detail by default (which ciphers are supported? which was selected?).

Let me edit DNS blacklists & whitelists in text. Let me turn off the blacklist for trusted domains, so they can show ads and make money. Let me disable JS except for trusted domains.

Render .md/.markdown files directly. Support some extras (GitHub-flavored, for example).

Store my settings & bookmarks in git repos. Let me snapshot my bookmarks manually/periodically and see side-by-side diffs.

Perhaps as a large plugin, let me pull up magnet links to fetch & serve documents over BitTorrent.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#243

Post by 1arity » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:25 AM UTC

Excavator wrote: post #210

1arity wrote: post #20

See the history as a tree, not as a list, so branch points can be preserved and you can navigate back over everywhere you've already been. A detailed development roadmap. Privileged browser Apps and Extensions working on mobile. C'mon, it's 2015! ( no PhoneGap required ) An automation API. The same really committed team who optimized V8. Source on GitHub ( not necessarily all of it mind, some can be privileged access…

For a history tree, something like FromWhereToWhere¹ and Session History Tree²? A roadmap like this?: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap Curious why you want one though? For an automation API, would the RemoteDebug APIs³ work, or perhaps the command-line⁴ API for Firefox? See node-firefox⁵ for an example of using the RemoteDebug API to automate some functions in Firefox. What makes you perceive the V8 team as…

I watched a couple of video presentations V8 did about optimization. It was really coherent. And their skills were really advanced. Also, visceral experience of the speed and stability of Chrome.

Also visceral experience deving Chrome apps and extensions ( man, I love their clear APIs ) versus doing the same in Moz with XUL ( omg, die ).

Browsers are as much about branding as anything, and I'm never going to come to the Mozilla camp. I don't believe a browser works to be a political cause, nor do I believe Mozilla is anything like the narrative they have about it. I mean what the hell is the committee of the Mozilla foundation doing? Wasting time with meetings about the grandiose purpose as a "movement", instead of making a better browser.

They pretend they're so "righteous" and yet all that pedantic dogmatic nitpicking and differentiating themselves is actually costing a lot of efficiency, which doesn't work for people who browse or for people who code.

Aside from that, I like the way Chrome does JS, and I don't like the way Moz does. Custom Elements, c'mon!

The masses have voted anyway. Chrome FTW.

Your answer was clear, it just seems we're on different sides of the browser divide. I wonder why there's so much loyalty? The browser is such an important piece of software.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#244

Post by qu4z-2 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:41 AM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #190

Great question. - No tabs, that's the job of the window manager. I get that most window managers are too underpowered to replicate browser tabs. Stop using those window managers I guess. Note that this gets you tab isolation for free, since every "tab" is just a completely different browser process. It hardly wastes any memory, too, because of dynamic linking. - No features. I want to be able to set the url, search,…

How is the lack of "memory waste" caused by dynamic linking, if I may ask? I thought multiple copies of the same binary already shared text whether dynamically or statically linked?

Also, agreed: surf is lovely, except for the lack of adblock/selective noscript. And the cookie jar was pretty rudimentary last I checked.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#245

Post by moviuro » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 8:17 AM UTC

dagw wrote: post #43

moviuro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate, please? (link, pointers?)

Opening new incognito tabs/windows will let you log on with different accounts in each window.

No, cookies are shared across incognito windows (try gmail.com)

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#246

Post by dagw » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 8:35 AM UTC

moviuro wrote: post #245

dagw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening new incognito tabs/windows will let you log on with different accounts in each window.

No, cookies are shared across incognito windows (try gmail.com)

Ah, didn't realize that. Thinking about it, I've only used this 'hack' to have two different gmail accounts open at the same time (one in normal, one in incognito).

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#247

Post by V-2 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 12:15 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #180

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who's going to pay for ads anymore if browsers come with adblocking by default?" Why is this my problem? Nobody pays for buggy whips any more because we don't use horse and buggies. Times move on. Apologies for sounding flip. I understand lots of folks have business models based on ads. This is most unfortunate, but it's no reason to screw over the consumer and not give them something they want simply because other…

The consumer that wants ad-blocking already downloads an ad-blocker and gets exactly what they want. Making ad-blocking the default option for a mainstream browser means that people who don't dislike ads sufficiently to find a plugin that blocks them no longer subsidise the web for those that do. It's your problem when you start encountering paywalls where previously only [blocked] ads existed.

Exactly

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#248

Post by forgotpasswd3x » Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 10:44 PM UTC

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #151

No antifeatures / downgrades. I am aware that this is a fuzzy concept. However, a few specifics: * Think very hard before adding things to make sure that they actually need to be in the core browser. Looking at you, FF Hello. * Don't baby the user. Everything should be configurable. And existing options should not be changed on upgrades. And general solutions are (always) better than centralized services. Looking at…

What problem do you have with Hello? It doesn't do anything unless you use it anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#249

Post by awalGarg » Thu, Aug 20, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

My ideal web browser should be able to identify if a page really needs JavaScript enabled or not, and disables it if all the page does with JavaScript is load Facebook/Google/Twitter's iframes, advertisements, shows animations and popups etc. which have nothing to do with the content. Disables all autoplaying content, doesn't load images like large banners and footers automatically.

Kinda like switching to that "Reader mode" of Firefox automatically based on some AI.

Re: Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?

#250

Post by TheLoneWolfling » Wed, Aug 26, 2015, 2:37 AM UTC

forgotpasswd3x wrote: post #248

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #151

No antifeatures / downgrades. I am aware that this is a fuzzy concept. However, a few specifics: * Think very hard before adding things to make sure that they actually need to be in the core browser. Looking at you, FF Hello. * Don't baby the user. Everything should be configurable. And existing options should not be changed on upgrades. And general solutions are (always) better than centralized services. Looking at…

What problem do you have with Hello? It doesn't do anything unless you use it anyway.

It's bloat. Memory use, startup time, attack surface, terms of use (although this is more with Pocket than Hello), number of things that need to be configured on install, etc.

I have no problem with Hello as a concept. I have every problem with it being part of the core browser as opposed to being an addon.