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You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

berjon.com

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Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#21

Post by skybrian »

zx8080 wrote: post #11
Mistletoe wrote: post #4

If I had to guess, Google will only change Chrome in ways that make it more money. Browsers could do all kinds of awesome things but Google isn’t going to do any of it if it interferes with sending people to ads. It would be kind of nice if the majority browser wasn’t owned by the people selling you ads.

Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads. DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now. It's actually very clever: once b…

I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things? On mobile, some people even use apps that only interact with one bank. Or an app just for YouTube.

(I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.)

A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#22

Post by schiffern »

DennisP wrote: post #10

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

Sounds like serializing the entire tab state (DOM, JS, form inputs, etc) for instant resume, plus indexing text for instant search.

Imagine being able to resume a complex web-app, complete with input form text and the entire application state. A huge limitation of most browser suspend/resume implementations is that they often cause data loss.

We've all had the experience of letting a tab get too "stale" and suddenly it drops you back to the main page or the (dreaded) empty form. This mistrust becomes a constant mental burden, often forcing you to unnaturally twist your workflow due to fear of getting burned again. Yuck.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#23

Post by mostlylurks »

clouddrover wrote: post #13
DennisP wrote: post #10

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

The usability of bookmarks is far worse than that of tabs. With tabs, I can just middle click in the relevant window and the tab will be in the right place, waiting for me. With bookmarks I have to either spend a lot of effort putting the bookmark into the right folder, or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks. And I'd have to remove the bookmarks once I'm done with them.

And as someone who opens up hundreds of tabs and returns to many of them only several months later, bookmarks serve a different purpose in my workflow than tabs. Tabs are single-use; I close them after I consume the content in the tab and never open them again. Bookmarks are reusable, pages which I may want to return to multiple times.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#24

Post by idle_zealot »

eduction wrote: post #8

What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms? This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.

What he's actually proposing are Web Tiles[1], which he explains in the next article in this series. Basically a move from web pages as Internet-connected applications to being locally-cached reusable components that compose into workflows.

1: https://berjon.com/web-tiles/

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#25

Post by dspillett »

clouddrover wrote: post #13
DennisP wrote: post #10

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

> They should call this feature "bookmarks".

Keeping a tab open includes history in what is saved, which can be quite significant (if that tab was not opened as a fresh tab so has no history), a simple bookmark does not.

People here are suggesting storing more than that, not less, including the DOM so it's content can be searched later.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#26

Post by clouddrover »

mostlylurks wrote: post #23
clouddrover wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

The usability of bookmarks is far worse than that of tabs. With tabs, I can just middle click in the relevant window and the tab will be in the right place, waiting for me. With bookmarks I have to either spend a lot of effort putting the bookmark into the right folder, or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks. And I'd have to remove the bookmarks once I'm done with them. And as someone who opens up hundr…

> or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks.

What, you mean just like one big uncategorized list of tabs?

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#27

Post by DennisP »

clouddrover wrote: post #13
DennisP wrote: post #10

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

It's silly to require manual intervention for something so easy to automate. For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs, bookmarks aren't that helpful.

I can't resist quoting the article:

> (If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#29

Post by clouddrover »

DennisP wrote: post #27
clouddrover wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

It's silly to require manual intervention for something so easy to automate. For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs, bookmarks aren't that helpful. I can't resist quoting the article: > (If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)

> For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs

How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.

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