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

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 you, Firefox "You cannot install unsigned extensions, period".

* Don't introduce "features" that hurt the end user. Looking at you, Pocket "you now are bound by the terms of Pocket's user agreement when you run FF".

* Don't try to do cat-and-mouse games. Looking at you, Firefox "we must try to prevent malware on the user's computer from taking over FF".

* Don't assume that everyone has the newest and best computer. Looking at you, Firefox "electrolysis tripling memory usage is fine, right?".

* Don't couple security updates with anything else. Looking at you, Firefox "you must downgrade to australis or else your browser will be unsecure aah!".

Unless the security update is a change to the UI.

Such as, make it easier for people to visit self-signed certificate websites, instead of the disaster that it is now.

Ive had friends not able to get by the "error warning" pages to see the photos on my self-hosted and self-signed encryption on my own site.

Id rather have everybody being able to MITM my self-hosted site, than only government agencies (because why would I pay for a ceritiface when any NSA compliant CA can then MITM that same "secure" connection, its false advertising on behalf of browsers, that somehow a CA signed certificate is worth more than self signed).

What else would you like it measured by? Paid subscriptions? Because we all know how that goes.

The breadth of online journalism we see today is precisely because of those ads everyone claims to hate. It allows anyone to quickly join the pot and lets the market decide their value. Without ads we'd be stuck with the 4 fuhrer model we had for the last 100 years.

To the best of my knowledge and reading of the provided link there's currently no way to disable "weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message. (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)" type errors.

Its impacting me on an intranet-ish site that doesn't need https level security but the admins set it up incompetently. If they had set up https correctly, that would be a waste of time but it would be OK. If they had run the whole thing on http that would have been OK because there is no (... known ...) sensitive data on that site. But no they had to do a halfway job.

There may be market space for a bifurcation. Merely being able to render html doesn't mean all html rendering has to be done by one app, much like .ps or .pdf does not work best with the "one true app to rule them all". I could see a market with a iron clad virtualized one virtual (OS?) image per corrupt and insecure domain, and a hippie flower child browser for intranets and local files that blindly trusts everyone but by design won't talk to non RFC1918 ip addresses or maybe it blindly trusts the user not to do anything too stupid.

I didn't know that the chrome://settings/passwords page existed until I read your comment. I actually just checked it out, and when I clicked the "Show" button on the password box, Chrome made me re-authenticate with my Windows password before it would show the password.

I don't know if this is a new feature, only available on Windows, etc., but it seems like this may be less of a concern now.

I did find it weird that I had to re-authenticate with my Windows password and not the password that Chrome is syncing passwords with, but it's better than nothing.