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

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

#61

Post by DanBC »

mod50ack wrote: post #27
DanBC wrote: post #23

Better bookmarking.

How so?

I book mark often. Unless you have rigid discipline your bookmarks will end up as a huge confusing list. Current bookmark managers feel like an afterthough. Google don't want you to use bookmarks. They want you to search so they can mine data and serve ads.

I'd pay money for a book mark manager that could organise my list of about 2,000 bookmarks. That software could have a "bulk bookmark import" feature so that users can share some set of bookmarks. "Here is my list of best pages about $ANIME_SERIES".

A bookmark manager that looked a bit like Pinterest, and that has options to locally save some content, is something I'd pay money for.

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

#62

Post by gunn »

From a previous HN post - I want a browser standard for an easily optimised subset of html technologies. To conform to this standard, pages would be restricted in the ways they can manipulate the DOM, have a simpler DOM, use only a small fraction of CSS properties, and not use some JS features e.g. eval, delete.

We can use the asm.js model for opting in. Browsers that support it run the pages super fast, other browsers run them just as fast as usual.

A browser engine supporting just this standard would be considerably smaller, more embeddable, and a nicer base for current webkit based apps (e.g. spotify, steam, or atom). It might also help apps that want to use something like webviews for embedding content but need to be careful with memory / performance.

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

#64

Post by jakub_g »

vdhus wrote: post #60
jakub_g wrote: 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?

For session restore, I use (on desktop) Firefox + Session Manager + BarTab Lite

"Save for offline" is quite good on Opera for Android

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

#65

Post by ivank »

Basically just Chrome with Tree Style Tab, a ctrl-tab that does LRU tab switching, and an option to delay tab loading on startup until the tab is clicked.

I'd also like the browser to ensure that websites can't read my identity when I'm browsing in an unrelated tab. Something like a variant of RequestPolicy.

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

#67

Post by beefman »

Tree-style tabs and the bookmark model to go with it (a bookmark can have a parent, so you can restore subtrees of tabs, each with its history intact).[1]

Scroll below bottom of page as necessary when navigating to anchor links.[2]

Put focus in urlbar when switching to a tab unless the user has already moved it onto the page.

Continue to allow bookmark keywords for custom searches from urlbar (e.g. "w fun" to search wikipedia for "fun"). This still works in Chrome and Firefox but it gets harder to configure with every release.

History should be sortable by most recent view, where closing or switching to a tab counts as a view. Makes separate "recently closed tabs" menu superfluous.

Full-text history search.

Support for MAFF archives.[3]

Built-in ad blocking.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2] http://lumma.org/microwave/#2006.02.24.3

[3] http://maf.mozdev.org

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

#68

Post by kenOfYugen »

mod50ack wrote: post #49
kenOfYugen wrote: post #47

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…

I agree. I don't know what you mean by a safe language though. I do realize an ideal browser is different for everybody, but I wanted to know what many different people thought was interesting

Mozilla made a language in order to build their new browser engine, servo [1]. That language is Rust [2]. The reasoning was that we have been relying for too long on systems languages where memory safety [3] related bugs have caused a lot of exploits [C, C++].

In big codebases, like the browsers tend to be, bugs have many places to hide, and such bugs are very hard to spot. You can't rely on contributors being extra careful continuously, because everyone makes mistakes. So by using a programming language with a garbage collector or memory safety guarantees, like Rust, and enforcing extreme modularity, critical bugs are much easier to be spotted.

[1] https://github.com/servo/servo [2] https://www.rust-lang.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety

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

#69

Post by 1stop »

OnleMeMeMe wrote: post #45
hadrien01 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, I have an iWork DVD with an installer. Should I just throw it up after discovering it doesn't use drag&drop, without even trying the app? Many programs do that, even Apple ones: iLife, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.

Yes, because it manipulates the system in some way beyond copying the app to app, it's often hard to deinstall without traces, hard to keep two versions side by side etc. So if the pain of the installer is larger than the added benefit of using Opera vs. Chrome, then yes.

Really? An app can still freely write to ~/Library and cause all the problems you just said. The installer is the wrong thing to object to...
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