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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?

#131
I'd like a strong "project" concept: a project could be a set of multi-tab windows, there'd be fast switching between projects and fast tab selection based on projects. Most computers nowadays have a lot of RAM and people use lots of tabs. It seems wrong that one resorts to public browser extensions to find ways to navigate through the tabs.

Possibly also tree-like relationships between tabs so that subtrees of tabs can be operated on as a unit.

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

#132
post #115

Control over who can run code on my machine. Have a block third party javascript option like we have a block third party cookies.

Sadly this would break a lot of websites and apps, since a lot of scripts are served from the Google (and other) CDNs these days. A whitelist of sorts could help though.

The problem with a whitelist is that tracking and malicious websites would just move their scripts to these CDNs.

It would certainly break compatibility with some websites, but so did removing flash or silverlight support, or introducing popup blockers before that. And with http2, scripts hosted on third party CDN are bound to disappear.

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

#133
post #115

Control over who can run code on my machine. Have a block third party javascript option like we have a block third party cookies.

What do you mean by "third party" javascript? Do you mean javascript that isn't hosted on the same domain as the HTML?

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

#135
post #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?

Zotero [0], with browser connector (extension), or alternatively a bookmarklet. Originally intended as a research tool to manage sources, hence the added benefit of being able to export collections as BibTeX.

[0]: https://www.zotero.org

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

As such a heavy user of bookmarks that I pay cash money for a 3rd party bookmark manager: literally any improvements would be great. The built-in bookmark managers of browsers - especially mobile ones - are incredibly anemic. EDIT: The bookmark manager I pay for is called Linkman - http://www.outertech.com/en/bookmark-manager . I first bought it around 10 years ago and still use an old version, so unfortunately I'm n…

What do you like most about Linkman compared with the default bookmark manager in your browser?

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

#137
Improving bookmarks to:

- Search through them better (by indexing their content and subject, autolabeling while allowing custom labels). (As a side-note, star-searching in Firefox is an undiscoverable feature; the new tab page should offer a way to do that.)

- Give a visual organization à la Desktop / iOS app layout. Currently, the new tab page gives the six most common sites, which subconsciously forces me to forget about the seventh most common site I visit.

- Give a neat access to offline webapps. Right now, going to one is inconvenient.

Most of all, include tab freezing by default (to remove the memory, stop the JS, etc. without having to close the tab)

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

#138
Yes, customizability and security (including privacy) are my top concerns.

Which is why I first and foremost want my ideal browser to not be owned or beholden to a major corporation that will abuse it for it's own purposes, like Google, Apple or Microsoft.

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