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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

#31

Post by AlotOfReading »

skybrian wrote: post #21
zx8080 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Financial service requirements have a habit of spreading into other websites. Imagine e.g. PayPal blocks their payment widget from working on other browsers. Suddenly shopping might be impossible with that browser. In fact, the current state is that PayPal will always require 2fa if you use Firefox, so this isn't particularly far fetched.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#33

Post by CSMastermind »

idle_zealot wrote: post #24
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/

Someone should write an article about that then because this series of articles does a poor job of explaining both the problem and the solution.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#34

Post by Izkata »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?

I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable:

* Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth)

* Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable.

I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#35

Post by inhumantsar »

julianeon wrote: post #19

Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes. I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen. In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them. Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed. The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a win…

Wouldn't PDFs be a better way to save them? Full page screenshots glitch out me about half the time, esp sites that use js to muck with scrolling

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#36

Post by ksec »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?

On HN, I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs ( I am not making this shit up ). And it was from a pre 2013 Account.

So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.

As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#37

Post by 13of40 »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?

Simple: Events come in, like emails, chats, bug reports, etc. They have URLs in them. I click the URL, bringing another tab into the world. Half the time I forget to close the tab. Sometimes the browser windows breed when I drag two tabs out to view them side by side. Days later I realize I can't keep track anymore and I run a script that kills *edge*,*chrome*.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#38

Post by Ayesh »

greenyoda wrote: post #7
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.

I agree, but nobody is forced to use Chrome. If Firefox (which I use) were to implement some really useful features that Chrome didn't have, maybe more people would start using it. Chrome may be the default browser on Android, but Firefox is as easy to install as any other app in the Play Store.

As browsers have reached the feature plateau, I still like the pace Firefox is innovating.

I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace.

Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#39

Post by mostlylurks »

clouddrover wrote: post #26
mostlylurks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, because my tabs are categorized into windows, each with their own purpose, and even inside those windows, the order of the tabs has some meaning and can be easily controlled, whereas the easy route of adding bookmarks into one big uncategorized list always just adds the bookmark at the end of the list, which is quite inconvenient.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#40

Post by b33j0r »

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.

I agree. These ideas are poetry, based on our jazz standards and hymns.

I disagree with “a good book is one that confirms what you already believe,” even if Willy Wonka writes it.

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