Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 250 posts

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

#111

Post by panic »

kenOfYugen wrote: post #109
panic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no 'browsing' features are included, isn't what you're left with the rendering engine itself? It seems like WebKit's WKWebView (or WebKitWebView on gtk, or ewk_view on efl) is pretty much what you're asking for. Edit: WKView should be WKWebView, sorry

By no "browsing features" I mean something closer to a headless browser. Just a library. Is that what WKView is about?

Yeah, it provides all the features of a browser without the UI for them. You embed the WKWebView (not WKView, I mistyped) in your browser app and call methods on it to load URLs, go back and forward, and so on.

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

#116

Post by throwaway6845 »

Less nannying.

Yeah, browser manufacturer, I know you want me to use HSTS and you want me not to browse to HTTPS sites without certificates and all that. That's fine. I can understand that (for example) Google wants to be the only org that can track where I'm browsing, not my ISP or the NSA.

But for the love of dog, give me an option to turn all that nannying shit off as and when I want to. My computer, my connection, I'll choose how much information I want to share with people. Not you.

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

#117

Post by brador »

therealunreal wrote: post #101
brador wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ad blocking? You know the internet runs on ads right? Without the ads all you'll see is paywalls and backchannel press releases.

That's debatable. The internet was without ads once so I'd say you'd lose some, win some.

That was a long time ago and even mailing lists and BBS had ads.

You can see it already on sites like Reddit and Buzzfeed, users block ads so the only solution is paid content hidden as user content. Be happy that, for now, it is more lucrative to separate the ads from the content, because the alternative is even worse.

In some ways, this last shred of free journalism we all enjoy online is because of those big ugly ads. Without them, no journalism, just illusion.

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

#118

Post by onion2k »

kenOfYugen wrote: post #100
onion2k wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a really hard time working out whether or not I agree with this idea. On the one hand my inner developer loves the idea. The notion that everything is a module, with well documented and robust APIs for communication between modules, is perfect. The browser could be all things to all people. But on the other hand there would be absolutely no additional value for a typical user. 99% of people (generalising,…

Allow me to present an analogy between operating systems and browsers. You can install Arch/Debian Linux or Ubuntu, and there is no collision there. You build your OS the way you want it or you run an automated installation and soon you are doing work, browsing, watching movies, etc. My point is that if Debian wasn't what it is, you wouldn't have Ubuntu which offers additional value to a typical user, and be stuck wi…

Choice is of value.

Choice also has costs.

I like the OS analogy, and it highlights the potential benefits well, but we also need to consider the downside.

It would load a huge amount of complexity on web developers. Rather than 5 browsers with a couple of versions of each, you'd need to start testing against a vast matrix of renderers, CSS engines, JS engines, chrome (as in browser chrome, not Chrome) plugins, etc, with versions of each and every one.

Testing software on Linux is hard enough that the economics mean an overwhelming majority of software manufacturers don't bother, or they do but they only support a very limited range of versions, or they release unsupported software that it's up to you to get working. That's definitely not something I believe we want to do for the web.

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

#119

Post by Aardwolf »

-Easier text selection on e.g. websites where all the text is links or weirdly placed dives, basically a mode where anything that's text or looks like text can be selected and copied as plain text. And somehow don't surprisingly select all text of the website just because you started dragging from the right side of some sentence.

-Less continuous disk usage for caching and stuff, batch all disk writes together every now and then or so

-Something to block the new type of popup, the type that brings some thing to the foreground and shades the background

-Something to block all the annoying European cookie warnings, I don't need them, I already know websites use cookies

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

#120

Post by wtbob »

- works on X, the terminal and Android (yeah, that's a tall order, but it sure would be nice to have the same keystrokes available in X and on the terminal, and the same information available everywhere)

- securely shares passwords across multiple hosts (emphasis on 'securely,' unlike Chrome and Firefox)

- blocks ads

- blocks JavaScript, but makes it very easy to selectively enable it

- supports , and (hey, you did ask for ideal!)

- written and extensible in Common Lisp (elisp or Python would be minimally acceptable): the goal here is to be able to have 'the emacs of web browsers'

Post reply on HN