Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 250 posts

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

#52
post #50

Skip all those features, just give me speed, a lot of it. Plugins would be great (I love vimperator) but speed and efficienty is the real deal here.

Speed's a difficult thing to achieve, depending on your setup, how many processes, RAM free, etc

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

#54
post #53

MOBILE: when I zoom a page the browser should treat this the same as if I change the window size on a desktop browser, and reflow the text. Mobile browsing is a really lousy horrible experience because there are some conflicting philosophies.

That should be an option. For example in my experience that kind of thing would be devastating to me

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

#55
Apart from customizability, security and decoupling of UI changes from API/perf/security fixes:

- Option to stop all audio/video in all tabs

- Lazy session restore

- Reliable "save for offline viewing"

- Decoupling of "read later" from bookmarks and a separate interface for both

Going wild:

- Automagic unloading, archiving and clustering of opened tabs, perhaps with an auto-extraction of TL;DR from long articles

I very often open lots of pages (from HN etc.) but have no time to read them all at the time of opening. They linger as background tabs until the background tabs count is so big so I have to close them all and probably never come back.

Would be cool if the browser was able to somehow unload and archive unused tabs (to free some memory), and perhaps automatically group them into several categories: say, "angularjs", "bash", "youtube", "news" etc. and provide a good interface to return to them later.

However due to sheer amount of links I follow, my problem might be unsolvable :)

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

#56
Basically Opera 12 or pre-Chromium Opera in general..

- Obvious things like encryption support, tabs, full cookie options, (customizable) "smart" address bar, speed dial, history, favourites, optional synchronization, extension support, spell check...

- heavily customizable UI,

- plenty of other customization through settings or Opera's neatly done opera:config,

- easily togglable (is that a word?) side panel with M2-style lightweight E-mail client, notes, history, page info, and whatnot,

- detailed page loading (speed, domains, amount of transferred data) and file download information (what, where from/to, when, how much),

- in-built "plugin-on-demand" and noscript,

- Dragonfly (I just can't seem to get used to Chromium's developer tools),

- easy image properties ( http://puu.sh/jEqjh/ab197d996e.png ),

- mouse gestures and switching between tabs with right-click + mouse wheel up/down or something similarly effortless

- tab stacking,

- and last but not least: if you want to make money off me, instead of sneakily tracing where I go and what I do and partnering with Google, ask me for it on first start and maybe with a discreet "donate/subscribe" button on the start page / speed dial.

...

Things that would be just nice:

- tab sandboxing

- their own rendering engine

- Unite

- One process per browser, not tab

- "reading mode" as seen on WP IE

...

I guess I want more of a browsing bundle, heh.

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

#57
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has this feature with dedicated profiles, and you can accomplish this in firefox pretty easily using some good extensions.

Yeah, but that's really a hassle and such a workaround shouldn't be required. And firefox's extensibility is great as usual, but its bloat and the new UI and the ads on the tab pages disillusioned me

In chrome, you can make a shortcut for a profile by providing a flag --profile-directory="YourProfileName" It will be created if it doesn't exist and you can even set it to point to a TEMP folder for throwaways.

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

#59

Modularity. I would like to see a browser that is designed as an engine, meaning that no UI/UX, or 'browsing' features are included. Much like a raw linux kernel in philosophy. I would like this ideal browser to have interoperability with various JS engines, HTML and CSS renderers, as well as the standardized specifications for the underlying network protocols. It should be 'safe' by being written in languages where…

Correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't this webkit?

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

#60
post #55

Apart from customizability, security and decoupling of UI changes from API/perf/security fixes: - Option to stop all audio/video in all tabs - Lazy session restore - Reliable "save for offline viewing" - Decoupling of "read later" from bookmarks and a separate interface for both Going wild: - Automagic unloading, archiving and clustering of opened tabs, perhaps with an auto-extraction of TL;DR from long articles I ve…

solutions to some of the things mentioned above, that people are happy with and using?
Post reply on HN