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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?

#201

Post by Shorel »

glenstein wrote: post #78
Aoyagi wrote: post #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…

I would second the wish for a return of Opera Unite. I thought their vision for what Unite could be was incredible and I was really sad to see it go.

Opera Unite would be a killer app with support for CloudFlare, so the pages would remain online when our computers were off, and auto sync of everything when the computer comes back online.

Also, with something like wordpress with themes and all the other silly things that made wordpress popular.

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

#203

Post by cessor »

A content filter plugin, that allows me to block content semantically. Every year I feel the net gets swamped by certain events which affects my browsing experience. Halloween and the Superbowl are fairly regular, or the football world championship. People on facebook, imgur, twitter or 9gag and so on then just can't shut up about it. I would like to take notice of a new image of Pluto and then click "seen" and have the similar pictures blocked on imgur, twitter and news sites.

I would like to have this as a browser feature that I can control and easily change, rather than just a plugin. Adblock Plus would be a similar idea but I wish I could automatically teach it to block even more.

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

#204

Post by Aoyagi »

Shorel wrote: post #200
Aoyagi wrote: post #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…

Chromium developer tools are very good, and the smartphone preview functionality is killer, but for really obscure JavaScript issues only the Dragonfly error messages made sense. They were clear an to the point every single time. I remember the JavaScript that ran in Kestrel bug free, would run everywhere bug free. Now, about mouse gestures and switching between tabs with right -click + mouse wheel, you can do that j…

Yeah, I use Vivaldi as my tertiary browser (or rather sometimes Vivaldi, sometimes Pale Moon, sometimes SeaMonkey) and I'm keeping close eye on it. It's still running on top of Google's code though, isn't it? :/

As for Dragonfly, it has "Resources". Chromium developer tools have "Sources", but I can't even tell if those things from Dragonfly's Resources are there. Mobile preview isn't very important for me as I use these tools for analysis and data extraction instead of actually developing, heh.

Anyway, a lot of the features that are critical for me are still missing and even if that was just the image properties windows, I won't uninstall O12. But Vivaldi is also missing (from those things I listed) other than Dragonfly also loading feedback, proper config (though it has vivaldi:flags, which seems to have extended from the last time I was there), structured history, the window bar doesn't say the page title, downloads are basic, ... all maybe tiny details to some, but they're huge quality of life improvements for me daily.

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

#205

Post by kalmi10 »

thelastguy wrote: post #199

Vertical Tree Style Tabs (aka, Hierarchical Tabs) where opening a new Tab will make it a child tab of the original Tab. Virtualized Tabs that unloads completely when it is no longer visible on the Tab Bar to save memory and CPU processing. NoScript built in. Ability to write Extension in any Language, aka, the Extension API is exposable to all Languages. Tabs opened in the background should not start playing Flash au…

Virtal tabs that save/restore their _state_ to/from _disk_.

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

#206

Post by TorKlingberg »

wtbob wrote: post #124
probably_wrong wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Built-in ad blocking. I read this and thought "that's dumb", until I realized that's because I already take for granted that every browser will provide an ad-blocker. This has not proven true for my mobile browser, and it's driving me crazy.

If you're using Android, then Firefox supports ad blocking. If you're not using Android…well, that's the choice you made.

Last time I checked ad blocking on Android was quite difficult to set up. It requires root, it runs as a background process, and I need to set up a proxy for each wifi connection. When the adblock process died, the internet connection would stop working completely.

I just want an ad blocker in the browser, like on the desktop.

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

#207

Post by yincrash »

brudgers wrote: post #191
knome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't creating a second user in chromium do what you want here? You could have a specific "social media" user.

I'm not sure what you mean. If this involves "sign in to Chromium" then that seems to involve signing in to Google, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Incidentally, Chromium is what I use for Facebook...and only Facebook, on this particular computer. And signing into Chromium with my Google account seems to me to be a big information leak.

Chrome/chromium has the distinction of user profiles[1]. You can have separate windows have separate profiles (but not separate tabs). This has nothing to do with Google accounts. Each profile has their own 'jail' of chrome resources (cookies/history/tabs/etc). This is really useful when you need multiple persisting sessions while doing web dev or whatever else.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles

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

#208

Post by ecoponderosa »

pvdebbe wrote: post #130

I think Firefox + Vimperator is pretty decent by itself, it could be slightly better. * Even better extension support -- enable writing extensions in any language: expose a file system based API for a full Unix philosophy experience. uzbl has something like this but it's not nearly as ideal as Vimperator is for my use case. * As others mentioned, lose mandatory UI downgrades and other crap Mozilla's been pushing us l…

I second better bookmarking, a lot better than what is currently offered. For me it is the easiest and fastest way to keep up with places I have visited and want to return to. I have bookmarks from back as far as Netscape Communicator. Moving between browsers on multiple machines and keeping bookmarks the same on all is impossible other than by pinning a link to a saved bookmarks.html file. Bookmarks should comprise at least 15-20% of all browser activity. Restoring archived .json and .html bookmarks files never seems to work unless you have a small collection. There has to be a better way. Maybe I will just pin a text file and add URLs to that each time I need to save a location.

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

#210

Post by Excavator »

1arity wrote: post #20

See the history as a tree, not as a list, so branch points can be preserved and you can navigate back over everywhere you've already been. A detailed development roadmap. Privileged browser Apps and Extensions working on mobile. C'mon, it's 2015! ( no PhoneGap required ) An automation API. The same really committed team who optimized V8. Source on GitHub ( not necessarily all of it mind, some can be privileged access…

For a history tree, something like FromWhereToWhere¹ and Session History Tree²?

A roadmap like this?: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap Curious why you want one though?

For an automation API, would the RemoteDebug APIs³ work, or perhaps the command-line⁴ API for Firefox? See node-firefox⁵ for an example of using the RemoteDebug API to automate some functions in Firefox.

What makes you perceive the V8 team as more committed than other teams?

You can use your GitHub login to sign in to Mozilla's Bugzilla⁶, is that not enough of an integration for you?

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fromwheretowh...

2: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/session-histo...

3: https://kenneth.io/blog/2015/03/12/remotedebug-one-year-late...

4: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

5: https://github.com/mozilla/node-firefox

6: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

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