Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?
I'd think customizability and security are top concerns, what do you think?
Just give me the security updates for the version I have, because I don't want your designer's latest idea of what a browser should look like, and unwanted new features forced down my throat with the security updates.
Choice about what new features to install - much like Windows updates, would be nice.
At the very least provide ways to keep things working and looking exactly how they are at the moment. Needing an add-on to bring back the status bar in Firefox is a joke.
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, tho a place to post issues that is no more code.google or crbugs, just, why? ).
A dev roadmap is just a general program requirement. Not specific to web browsers but good.
And you're right about mobile and extensions. There's no need to restrict when you don't have to! For a web browser on iOS, sadly you have to use Apple's engine but that's workable with js injection for extensions. And of course on Android there's no problem. I like that iOS is opening a little (I have an iPhone) but I wish it was more open like android, that way jail breaking would not be required for a lot of features. The one good thing now is that they're letting you side load apps from source with Xcode 7 without paying, but it's some michigas to go through. Mobile platforms are weird.
Contributions are very welcome :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/session-manager/...
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...
Also visceral experience deving Chrome apps and extensions ( man, I love their clear APIs ) versus doing the same in Moz with XUL ( omg, die ).
Browsers are as much about branding as anything, and I'm never going to come to the Mozilla camp. I don't believe a browser works to be a political cause, nor do I believe Mozilla is anything like the narrative they have about it. I mean what the hell is the committee of the Mozilla foundation doing? Wasting time with meetings about the grandiose purpose as a "movement", instead of making a better browser.
They pretend they're so "righteous" and yet all that pedantic dogmatic nitpicking and differentiating themselves is actually costing a lot of efficiency, which doesn't work for people who browse or for people who code.
Aside from that, I like the way Chrome does JS, and I don't like the way Moz does. Custom Elements, c'mon!
The masses have voted anyway. Chrome FTW.
Your answer was clear, it just seems we're on different sides of the browser divide. I wonder why there's so much loyalty? The browser is such an important piece of software.
I want to be able to stay logged into Google/Facebook/Linkedin for convenience without other browser tabs knowing anything about it...or isomorphically, I want to be able to browse the internet while logged into those services without the pages I am browsing leaking data back to those sites. I'll take the hit of downloading 100k of jquery on my 20mbit pipe a few extra times.
I want my browser to sandbox my information to the same degree I can achieve by running separate browsers or setting up special browsing VM's.
you do realize that facebook etc still track you, even if you're logged out, right?
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.
https://superuser.com/questions/377186/how-do-i-start-chrome...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/ (the developer happens to have the same lastname as my firstname, but we're not related in any way)
- 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-style lightweight E-mail client, notes, history, page info, and whatnot,
- detailed page loading (speed, domains, amount of transferred data) and file download information (what, where from/to, when, how much),
- in-built "plugin-on-demand" and noscript,
- Dragonfly (I just can't seem to get used to Chromium's developer tools),
- easy image properties ( http://puu.sh/jEqjh/ab197d996e.png ),
- mouse gestures and switching between tabs with right-click + mouse wheel up/down or something similarly effortless
- tab stacking,
- and last but not least: if you want to make money off me, instead of sneakily tracing where I go and what I do and partnering with Google, ask me for it on first start and maybe with a discreet "donate/subscribe" button on the start page / speed dial.
...
Things that would be just nice:
- tab sandboxing
- their own rendering engine
- Unite
- One process per browser, not tab
- "reading mode" as seen on WP IE
...
I guess I want more of a browsing bundle, heh.
Also, with something like wordpress with themes and all the other silly things that made wordpress popular.
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 just now with Vivaldi. It only needs synchronization and supporting extension icons to replace Chrome in my computers.
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.
Cookieplux[1] is a plugin I made for Firefox, It is still waiting for approval from Moziall. But I have released the source. So you can build it yourself.
[1] http://firstglitch.com/cookieplux/cookieplux-firfox-plugin-f...
* 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 lately: give us a platform to customize instead. (Practically running a Firefox compiled from sources helps with some of the issues people have, but sadly there will be a day they overhaul the UI in such a manner it hinders the usability. And because of the security stuff I just can't go back and use an old one forever.)
* Yeah, better bookmarking. Firefox could use a better system, and Vimperator doesn't solve it either. Full-text search among history + bookmarks would be pretty good.
The well exposed API for external apps could solve it all, save for crap UI. For instance, the bookmarks could be crawled to an org-mode document where I could annotate, categorize and tags things to my heart's content.
- securely shares passwords across multiple hosts (emphasis on 'securely,' unlike Chrome and Firefox)
- blocks ads
- blocks JavaScript, but makes it very easy to selectively enable it
- supports <script type="text/python">, <script type="text/common-lisp"> and <script type="text/smalltalk"> (hey, you did ask for ideal!)
- written and extensible in Common Lisp (elisp or Python would be minimally acceptable): the goal here is to be able to have 'the emacs of web browsers'
open a tab to chrome://settings/passwords
Click on a saved password and click "show"
Write down their site / password info. They'll never know you have their login data, no access logs or warnings.
Note that the people freaking out the most about this are incredibly uncreative, because they think this is the only way an unattended computer can be powned, usually combined with weird beliefs about "Security" being a boolean value. Obviously, if you have physical access, you stick a keylogger on there, steal the whole DB of passwords at the binary file level, take over the whole operating system, etc. Also for extra comedy the people most likely to be outraged stereotypically have the same password for all saved sites (LOL) so you really only need to write down one password for that user, and also stereotypically its a variation of "1Password" or their kids name, etc.
Sites that are heavily automated / packaged / locked down will not be up to date.
I can verify it works fine on linux 44.0.2403.107.
I have access to a 41.0.2272.101 on windows that is extremely heavily locked down and centrally distributed but I don't use that out on the internet, it would be non-trivial to test.
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.
1. Stability and Features
The browser should be stable and free of major bugs, reasonable feature requests should be fulfilled when fairly trivial or found to be important. Programmers should be knowledgable in the language the browser is in. Personally I'd write it in C++/wxWidgets, using Blink as the engine since that's the most popular and compatible renderer it seems.
2. Privacy and Security.
The user's ability to control their information should be key, and it should be kept locally unless the user explicitly chooses to send it off.
3. Customizability
The user should be able to make changes to how the browser operates through extensions, userscripts, userstyles, etc.
"Ideal" isn't one thing. Allowing for personal customizations while following closely the standards make the base for implementing many "ideal flavors" of browsing experience.
I do realize an ideal browser is different for everybody, but I wanted to know what many different people thought was interesting
In big codebases, like the browsers tend to be, bugs have many places to hide, and such bugs are very hard to spot. You can't rely on contributors being extra careful continuously, because everyone makes mistakes. So by using a programming language with a garbage collector or memory safety guarantees, like Rust, and enforcing extreme modularity, critical bugs are much easier to be spotted.
[1] https://github.com/servo/servo [2] https://www.rust-lang.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety
The "ideal" core I was talking about should be able to use WebKit as a rendering engine.
It seems like WebKit's WKWebView (or WebKitWebView on gtk, or ewk_view on efl) is pretty much what you're asking for.
Edit: WKView should be WKWebView, sorry
A modular browser would only benefit developers, and we can already cope with delving deep in to the internals of many browsers if necessary. So is there really any point in a modular browser? Who would it be for?
You can install Arch/Debian Linux or Ubuntu, and there is no collision there. You build your OS the way you want it or you run an automated installation and soon you are doing work, browsing, watching movies, etc.
My point is that if Debian wasn't what it is, you wouldn't have Ubuntu which offers additional value to a typical user, and be stuck with Windows forever. Choice is of value.
Do you want to be stuck with Firefox, Chrome etc. knowing how hard they adapt to real needs and ignore bug fixing in favor of new features?
A browser is not your 'typical' application. Browsers are in my opinion true virtual machines and should be treated as such.
Choice also has costs.
I like the OS analogy, and it highlights the potential benefits well, but we also need to consider the downside.
It would load a huge amount of complexity on web developers. Rather than 5 browsers with a couple of versions of each, you'd need to start testing against a vast matrix of renderers, CSS engines, JS engines, chrome (as in browser chrome, not Chrome) plugins, etc, with versions of each and every one.
Testing software on Linux is hard enough that the economics mean an overwhelming majority of software manufacturers don't bother, or they do but they only support a very limited range of versions, or they release unsupported software that it's up to you to get working. That's definitely not something I believe we want to do for the web.
Unfortunately current mainstream browsers don't comply with the standards to the fullest, although I admit compliance is orders of magnitude better than years ago.
Aren't Chrome only apps and web sites harming the web?
I agree with testing Linux software completely. It's maddening how much the notion of testing is ignored.
Well it's a win-win situation, build the ideal browser, then you have already built the "ideal" OS ;)
On "complicated" web pages, tiny changes in the position of the mouse while dragging (selecting text) can result in large changes in the selection (the parts of the page highlighted in light blue). Sometimes a tiny change in mouse position even causes a whole 'nother column of text to be highlighted.
It sometimes takes many tries simply to select the contiguous words I want to copy. It sometimes takes planning and learning from experience. I would prefer for selecting text with the mouse to be so easy that I can always keep all of my planning and learning faculties focused on the ideas discussed on the web page.
Even on pages (such as the page where this comment will appear) where selecting text with the mouse is relatively straightforward, I would prefer to be able to select a contiguous series of lines (or paragraphs if individual lines is too hard) by dragging in the left margin the way that it is possible to select a contiguous series of lines in TextMate 2 or in Sublime Text 3 by dragging in the gutter (the left margin where the line numbers appear). (Neither Firefox nor Chrome lets me do that with HN's pages.)
In general, I would prefer for my browser to be optimized for "active reading" or "reading broadly understood" (reading plus related activities like copying a short passage from a web page and pasting it into a text editor).
I would probably make heavy use of such a "browser optimized for reading" even if it barfed on "complicated" web pages (i.e., failed to render all or part of pages that use a difficult-to-implement modern web API) provided there were an "Open in Firefox" or "Open in Chrome" item on the right-click menu whenever the mouse is over a link -- or some similar easy-to-implement convenience.
In other words, I think I'd use it and love it even if it was unusable with most pages on the modern web as long as it provides a good experience on certain sites with relatively simple pages, like HN and Wikipedia.
We can use the asm.js model for opting in. Browsers that support it run the pages super fast, other browsers run them just as fast as usual.
A browser engine supporting just this standard would be considerably smaller, more embeddable, and a nicer base for current webkit based apps (e.g. spotify, steam, or atom). It might also help apps that want to use something like webviews for embedding content but need to be careful with memory / performance.
* 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!".
With the exception of the Pocket and Hello arguments, Chrome has all of these problems. Electrolysis, the malware stuff, etc... all comes from Chrome stuff!
As you said, it all comes from Chrome. Well... Guess why I don't use Chrome. And guess why I've switched away from mainline FF.
I have no problem with Hello as a concept. I have every problem with it being part of the core browser as opposed to being an addon.
Solves the security issue right there, aint nobody tracking me now. I'd like to see 1337 kidz xploit that paper. Escalate that privilege , from my rocking chair! And let me choose from a number of layouts. The smell of that fresh printers ink, nothing like it!
Bits and scroll bars and cookies. No taste, it's just trash.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2715617/The-D...
Although the service did fold so maybe it was too much.
Yeah, browser manufacturer, I know you want me to use HSTS and you want me not to browse to HTTPS sites without certificates and all that. That's fine. I can understand that (for example) Google wants to be the only org that can track where I'm browsing, not my ISP or the NSA.
But for the love of dog, give me an option to turn all that nannying shit off as and when I want to. My computer, my connection, I'll choose how much information I want to share with people. Not you.
https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks/blob/master/firefox-t...
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.
Never remove old history items when revisiting a page, but leave the history intact.
Treat tabs more like temporary bookmarks (and thus allow bookmark actions to be used with them like search (full-text), (batch) re-naming, arranging in folders, sorting).
Notes that can be attached to tabs and to websites.
A history of closed tabs.
Scripting support with REPL that allows to quickly process content of multiple tabs at once.
Transparent access to cookies and localStorage.
Something like Privacy Badger included.
Place dialog boxes always near the cursor, not in a tiny bar or in a pop-up near the top.
Bandwidth stats during page load.
Speed: No full-screen transition animations, lazy tab loading, smart tab unloading, ability to quickly and temporarily disable img, embed, video, script etc.
That's an awesome idea, does any browser have that?
Scroll below bottom of page as necessary when navigating to anchor links.[2]
Put focus in urlbar when switching to a tab unless the user has already moved it onto the page.
Continue to allow bookmark keywords for custom searches from urlbar (e.g. "w fun" to search wikipedia for "fun"). This still works in Chrome and Firefox but it gets harder to configure with every release.
History should be sortable by most recent view, where closing or switching to a tab counts as a view. Makes separate "recently closed tabs" menu superfluous.
Full-text history search.
Support for MAFF archives.[3]
Built-in ad blocking.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Without the ads all you'll see is
paywalls and backchannel press releases.
You can see it already on sites like Reddit and Buzzfeed, users block ads so the only solution is paid content hidden as user content. Be happy that, for now, it is more lucrative to separate the ads from the content, because the alternative is even worse.
In some ways, this last shred of free journalism we all enjoy online is because of those big ugly ads. Without them, no journalism, just illusion.
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.
Also, it's been tried before and has failed every time.
A subscription based donation system might still work though.
Why is this my problem? Nobody pays for buggy whips any more because we don't use horse and buggies. Times move on.
Apologies for sounding flip. I understand lots of folks have business models based on ads. This is most unfortunate, but it's no reason to screw over the consumer and not give them something they want simply because other people get paid money for it.
It's your problem when you start encountering paywalls where previously only [blocked] ads existed.
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 not using Android…well, that's the choice you made.
I just want an ad blocker in the browser, like on the desktop.
Nope, just install Firefox, go to Tools:Add-ons, find AdBlock Plus or uBlock Origin, install it, and never see an ad again. No rooting, no proxying, no goofiness.
Only works in the browser, but it works well enough for me.
1. Terminal-only (^Z is a thing that I want)
2. Capable of some basic CSS support (e.g., colors, basic text decorations; whatever can be simply translated to ANSI escape codes)
3. Capable of doing <div>-based page layouts fairly consistently.
4. Just enough Javascript support to login to a couple of webpages I like and nothing more
5. Some basic support for cookies and bookmarks (though, a session save would be an acceptable alternative for me)
6. Basic support for privacy/security features (think DNT header, HSTS, etc.)
7. (optional) libsixel integration for image/video output
Having the above presents me with the ability to leave GUI web-browsers behind entirely. Ads and the like would essentially be immaterial if JS and images are toggleable and everything would be glorious. Of course, no one appears to want this kind of thing enough for it to have been created yet. So I will eventually probably break down and make it myself :P
HSTS support would be a welcome patch.
Admittedly, those three things are the hardest ones in the list.
* Browser written in a way that prevents most exploits.
* Built-in Javascript and cross-domain request blocking.
* Single-process sandboxed browser where only the active tab is allowed to run.
* Tab content written to disk so it can be restored in the event of a crash or running out of battery.
* Ability to "swap out" tabs to disk so they consume no memory.
* Ability to freeze all javascript code on a tab temporarily.
* Deep searching of history (i.e. page content).
* Created by a privacy-friendly organization/people who aren't trying to spy on you.
* Avoid doing things automatically (download files to a folder, search for misspelled URLs, send URL to Google when typing it in, etc). Don't have keyboard shortcuts that are hard to undo (also, don't have single-key letter/number shortcuts at all).
* Don't have an over-engineered build process. The browser should be possible to build (not necessarily fast) on an old or low-end computer.
+1 on easy build process
* Reader browser
* Application browser
The reader browser should show you the "web" in a kindle-like readable experience, just as it does today.
However, the application browser, although it does receive a URL, should not have any HTML page as a default view. Instead, a JavaScript should be first loaded, and from there, following the permissions it requests, it can open new windows, notifications, or any other desktop feature needed, which websites that just need to be read do not need.
Application browser: but then why limit it to JavaScript?
Is it what you mean?
This is already technically kind of sort of possible with any number of sites that use compile-to-js languages, but these are invariably limited by the capabilities javascript and HTML. I suppose the ultimate version of this would look like browseable software images like Docker or something.
Now I'm seeing Chrome become bloated, and slow. On top of this, it's now trying very hard to identify me by asking me to sign in with my Google account.
I want my next browser to make me forget that I'm using a browser in the first place, and also to not care about my identity.
[1] I prefer Firefox so I use the FxOpera theme
[2] Well, it tries its best on Linux (unlike Chrome), but it's near perfect on Windows and Mac OS
I got bad news for you
But still, I don't think they track searches and history like Chrome.
Many programs do that, even Apple ones: iLife, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.
So if the pain of the installer is larger than the added benefit of using Opera vs. Chrome, then yes.
And firefox's extensibility is great as usual, but its bloat and the new UI and the ads on the tab pages disillusioned me
1. http://firstglitch.com/cookieplux/cookieplux-firfox-plugin-f...
Feel free to try it out.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/multifox/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/multilogin/nccllfn...
Show TLS negotiation in detail by default (which ciphers are supported? which was selected?).
Let me edit DNS blacklists & whitelists in text. Let me turn off the blacklist for trusted domains, so they can show ads and make money. Let me disable JS except for trusted domains.
Render .md/.markdown files directly. Support some extras (GitHub-flavored, for example).
Store my settings & bookmarks in git repos. Let me snapshot my bookmarks manually/periodically and see side-by-side diffs.
Perhaps as a large plugin, let me pull up magnet links to fetch & serve documents over BitTorrent.
There used to be a Firefox extension for that, but that now doesn't work anymore because of changes in Firefox. Chrome closed a feature request for that with WONTFIX (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1639).
EDIT: Oh, and also a simple user-friendly way to block autoplay of all audio and video elements. Maybe a "quiet mode" switch or something like that.
Same with a passwords file, except make it encrypted with a master key.
I've always been wary of who can see my bookmarks, but not for any particular reason. It kind of reminds me how US libraries are vigilant to shield your checkout history from government searches.[0]
[0] An ongoing issue in the age of the PATRIOT Act. http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000060501
If they are encrypted before they leave the client so much the better. I would consider that a hard requirement for the passwords, so might as well do it for the bookmarks too.
- Extensive customizability of the interface
- Proper tab management (tiling, cascade, positioning) and tab stacking
- Mouse gestures
- Content blocker baked in
- RSS reader included
- Better cookie control
- Per-site privacy mode
- low CPU/memory usage - no "one tab per process" - I want 10s of tabs open without wasting few GBs of memory
- fast JS
- advanced search from address bar - custom search engines with search suggestions
- customizable Speed Dial baked in - no extensions needed.
- Dragonfly instead of DevTools
- detailed page loading info, not just "Loading example.com..."
I'm hoping to get at least some of these things out of either Vivaldi or Otter Browser when they're mature enough...
Or maybe compiled HTML (like microsoft .CHM), except open (duh).
Reason ? Parsing XML or HTML is very CPU-intensive, and cheap smartphone's small CPUs (which have a very low L2 cache) have a very hard time dealing with it, not to mention classic desktop browser memory footprints. If not even regex can do it, why the hell not ? I'm sure the memory footprint of firefox and chrome is incompressible because of the raw nature of HTML. And for the life of me, if nobody can read a HTLM page generated anymore, what's the point of it ? Why not just compile it ?
I guess I could submit it to the IETF, to be honest. I'm not even a software engineer so basically I'm not sure if my idea is right or not, but I'll always find weird that the app-version of websites perform so much better than their HTML version.
In the internet explorer days, this was not possible because firefox and chrome were not mainstream, but I'm sure now is a good opportunity. It could eventually even replace or substitute .DOC and PDF files.
It would be nice if they showed a nice visual fingerprint too, although it's hard to prove their safety.
- No tabs, that's the job of the window manager. I get that most window managers are too underpowered to replicate browser tabs. Stop using those window managers I guess. Note that this gets you tab isolation for free, since every "tab" is just a completely different browser process. It hardly wastes any memory, too, because of dynamic linking.
- No features. I want to be able to set the url, search, have back/forward buttons, zoom the text. That's it.
- Extensible in a Unixy way. Press a key and execute a program with some hooks to modify the browser.
So far suckless's surf browser fits the bill. I currently use surf with a patch that lats me search duckduckgo from the dmenu url field.
- Support for privacy enhancing extensions. NoScript, µBlock, PrivacyBadger, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. I'm trying to see how these could work as a component separate the browser and I'm coming up blank on how to present the UI nicely. Currently I use privoxy for this, but it's subadequate.
Also, agreed: surf is lovely, except for the lack of adblock/selective noscript. And the cookie jar was pretty rudimentary last I checked.
Plugins would be great (I love vimperator) but speed and efficienty is the real deal here.
(And yes, I've tried all the Chrome alternatives and they are not as good)
* Fully open source, with clear and open licensing.
* Extensions with a permissions system that works at multiple levels of granularity. So I should be able to trust an extension but deny it some specific things (without breaking it.)
* A headless mode, with python/ruby/other bindings, so I can use it as an automation library.
2. Granularity is a great thing to have as well. Extensions could maybe be broken into multiple sections, so you could have a- Permission to inject into page 2- permission to access saved passwords c- permission to access local files etc etc etc, and then you could set its local file root or what sites it can run in.
3. A headless browser sounds pretty great but with the nonstandard essence of web design I wonder how one would use it usefully in automation.
- 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 very often open lots of pages (from HN etc.) but have no time to read them all at the time of opening. They linger as background tabs until the background tabs count is so big so I have to close them all and probably never come back.
Would be cool if the browser was able to somehow unload and archive unused tabs (to free some memory), and perhaps automatically group them into several categories: say, "angularjs", "bash", "youtube", "news" etc. and provide a good interface to return to them later.
However due to sheer amount of links I follow, my problem might be unsolvable :)
"Save for offline" is quite good on Opera for Android
2. A separated out password store where the store prompts me for each password request and I have to allow it. The store would work with more than just browser passwords.
3. Better cookie control: I need no persistent cookies, apart from whatever Google uses for 2FA.
* Something other than javascript as a compilation target when using something else for those of us allergic to JS (scalajs.) I've only looked at it briefly but WebAssembly looks like a good candidate for this
* Less feature bloat, remove as many features as possible from the browser core and leave any non essential feature to plugins.
I'd also like the browser to ensure that websites can't read my identity when I'm browsing in an unrelated tab. Something like a variant of RequestPolicy.
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.
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 automatically. Only once the Tab is selected, does Flash play, and continue to play in the background after moving to another Tab. Should be able to right click on the Tab and Allow Flash to Continue Playing in the Background.
Most importantly is speed and low CPU usage (running a hundred Javascripts per webpage literally kills speed).
I'd also love for there to be a Unix-ish interface for browser plugins/extensions that isn't dependent on a specific language (or, if it is, for that language to be something C-compatible for maximum FFI compatibility). The more I can do without touching a single line of JS, the better.
In other words, a block element's internal flow width should be restricted to screen width, so that a row of inline elements inside that block can never be wider than screen width.
In other words, text columns should flow at screen width.
Just doing what desktop browsers do would squish the text in a very narrow space. Not desirable.
For me, this is the single most important feature in a mobile (phone) browser.
-Less continuous disk usage for caching and stuff, batch all disk writes together every now and then or so
-Something to block the new type of popup, the type that brings some thing to the foreground and shades the background
-Something to block all the annoying European cookie warnings, I don't need them, I already know websites use cookies
- 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)
Firefox was built on that ideology. Until it became the same monster that it was supposed to replace. The same thing is happening to chrome.
Kinda like switching to that "Reader mode" of Firefox automatically based on some AI.
Textareas that don't suck.
Possibly also tree-like relationships between tabs so that subtrees of tabs can be operated on as a unit.
Very lightweight, low CPU usage.
Extensible, easy to write addons.
Keyboard shortcuts, single-key shortcuts for everything.
A good bookmark manager.
Customisable till the very end, through a simple to understand menu instead of the about:config way.
Minimal, no mail or RSS client, just the vanilla browser.
Superb in-memory caching for instant page navigation.
In fact, the old Opera had nearly all these features before they went and messed it all up, making it a chrome clone in a different skin. I was a paid user since the 2.x days.
Even if i open many tabs shouldnt freeze or crash, Thats one of the most important thing i care about, Mostly firefox does that, keeps crashing if you open many tabs.
Would be great if allows to sync with mobile, like if i enjoy a website and display right away on my mobile, instead of using extension it should the out of the box. We are living on a mobile world now.
I'd pay money for a book mark manager that could organise my list of about 2,000 bookmarks. That software could have a "bulk bookmark import" feature so that users can share some set of bookmarks. "Here is my list of best pages about $ANIME_SERIES".
A bookmark manager that looked a bit like Pinterest, and that has options to locally save some content, is something I'd pay money for.
One solution would be to let you install third-party bookmark managers which would replace the built-in bookmark UI. That seems even more ripe for abuse than features like custom toolbars, though, which are already heavily abused in current browsers.
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 neither up-to-date with its present capabilities nor the current landscape of 3rd party bookmark managers.
give me all bookmarks that are tagged "tools" AND "unix" AND "visualization" AND (NOT HAVING "monitoring")
There is an add-on called "tagsieve" that I used heavily, it had a nice visual possibility to filter the bookmarks with a tag cloud - though it didn't have a search language. But throughout the years often it was not compatible with new Firefox version (just see that it is installable again).
• Good OS integration
• Prioritization of power efficiency over performance
• Built in request-based ad blocking like that found in iOS 9/El Capitan Safari
• Tabs in a list on the side of the window
• Per tab processes
• In-browser video playback handled by embedded mpv
• General focus on being a vehicle for viewing websites rather than trying to be an application platform
- full libre gpl3'ed codebase including plugins and extensions.
- immediate disclosure of all security problems (in the hope they get fixed promptly). the socalled "responsible" delayed disclosures annoy me to no end. let every exploit be a 0day exploit and leave it to the user to decide, at least it'll be an informed user!
That browser is dead now :(
I used Dillo between 209 and 2012 on an old 800MHz AMD box. It was really nice... being able to resume from hibernation, have 800 tabs open, and have a hyper-responsive machine. :D
Fork of Chromium without:
- all Google things
- Non-browser things like accounts and pdf viewers.
With:
- attempt https if protocol is not provided
- blocking all js unless whitelisted
- blocking all requests to 3rd party domains unless whitelisted
- blocking all attempts to hijack right mouse clicks
- blocking all redirect attempts unless whitelisted
- destruction of all cookies/web storage on start/close unless whitelisted
etc.
- It must be ultra lightweight: fast when starting up, fast when handling load of tabs, just fast.
- Doing _one single thing_ exceptionally well: enable the user to browse. Built-in modularity means add-ons/plug-ins/etc can optionally be added to expand the browser capabilities.
So yeah: IMO a browser really should be just the browser with a good Addon-On API. That's why I would add a third point to your list:
- The Browser Team should provide (optional) Core-Plugins which are easy to install and in turn provide basic but useful features. For instance those mentioned in other comments here (e.g. uBlock, MAFF-Support, Mouse-Gestures, ...)
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.
It's how I survived with 600+ tabs in Firefox ;-)
Make device fingerprinting impossible.
Tabbing should be separated according to the context.
Bookmarking should be improved.
Instead of a plain web browser the program should work as a knowledge access/management system.
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.
[edit] in fact an alternative to blocking third party cookies is to restrict third party cookies to the domain-visited/third-party-domain, such that third parties can still use cookies to track you on the domain visited but that cookie can't track you accross websites.
- pet-peeve: "disable JS" ON by default (option now buried in the guts of Firefox)
Benefits: speed, privacy (less interaction with CDNs).
- No phoning home
- In-built privacy protection
Myself included.
It's basically impossible not to these days.
I'd consider it professionally irresonsible to let a non-technical user loose on the web without a good ad blocker. It's just too dangerous out there.
A few months ago I was thinking about the old MinWin improvements (to Windows' basic core services), how Windows 8.1/10 are (arguably) smaller and lighter than Vista, etc... and it clicked: Microsoft have realized they're no longer the "hardware industry killer app," if you will, and have moved out of the way... to let the Web take its place.
In my opinion, Web browsers are basically mind-bogglingly complex rube goldberg machines, based on conflicting standards that are also rube goldberg machines, and the whole scene is basically meta-rube-goldberg-ception.
A lot of the complexity and conflict is mostly due to the history and tradition behind the technologies we're using: on the one hand, all you want is arbitrary sandboxed code execution and sane UI; on the other hand, sites start delivering content exclusively via JS and everyone gets mad. And in the meantime, who audits their web browsers? What was that about "safe" code execution, where the browser protects you from "nasty" code? We hear about the browsers themselves doing the wrong thing by users almost every week.
We need to fight this. I've come to the conclusion that the only way this can be done is to simply make the effort and do the hard graft to port a bunch of existing applications to a new coherent, practical modality/paradigm, dump the whole thing on an unsuspecting world, and wait to see what happens next. It might catch on. It might not. Get feedback, try again. Keep trying until it goes viral enough to make a dent and improve people's lives.
There are so many interesting and fascinating UI experiments out there, but nobody seems to want to commit to actually practically trying out a few of them in real applications :( and I think that's what's holding everything back - everyone's waiting for everyone else to make the first move.
Here's where I'd start: everything should be able to send messages to everything else, to work around the language problem; everything should be an object with arbitrarily settable properties - everything from the files in the filesystem to the windows on the screen; with the appropriate security context surrounding everything, you could do crazy things like programmatically share the tags you attach to the files you share over P2P, or tag images with text descriptions of their contents; the console should be inherently textual but in such a way that it is exclusively touch-gesture-drivable; I strongly believe in the anti-mac/post-mac UX paradigm; I believe that it's impossible to create the "ultimate" solution that will work for everyone, and that all I can ever hope to do is nudge everything in what I think is a good general direction. And the only sane way to release an implementation like this is to put it into the public domain.
Agh, this probably reads like a rant, and I guess it is. I'm just not sure where to start, although I do have some ideas. Incidentally, I frequently use "asmqb7" on the web, including for my Gmail account.