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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

I don't even want a bookmark manager built-in. Address bar, tabs, viewport, dev tools. Done. Make it fast.

So to the average non-developer computer-neanderthal who checks weather, movie times and news, you think it's more important to have dev tools in the standard build than bookmarks?

I find this "Give me only what I want" attitude quite frustrating. Perhaps you could argue for a more modular system that disables any given feature, but I would challenge you 8 days a week that bookmarks are a useful tool for most.

And really, bookmarks? How is that a performance hit? Maybe one would say that the "awesome bar" takes cycles to auto-search bookmarks when typing a URL, but you can disable that already.

I don't think he mean that, but this instead: "Give me these stuff. And also make it fast".

It was an extreme example to convey a point but now I realize I didn't take it far enough. My original point was that path keeping should be handle by a standalone program for several reasons: web pages aren't the only source of paths I want to keep; my primary browser isn't the only program I want to open paths in; there is often more data I want to associate with a path like a tags, notes, user names/passwords (often more than 1 pair), etc. We already have window managers so tabs are taken care of. URLs are just like file paths... Actually, my file manager looks exactly like my browser, I just don't have an HTML/JavaScript/CSS handler that doesn't also have it's own version of a file manager. The internet is just another file system and we already have file system browsers. You're right about dev tools, that should be separate, probably best to incorporate it into gdb. I think I'm on to something here.

I agree, it would be nice if everything else (even the dev tools) was just an add-on, even if it was officially provided and supported by Mozilla and installed by default (or asked upon install when doing a custom install). That's not the way things are though, in no popular browser, and people complaining about Mozilla doing this bugs me a bit.

As an aside, I'm looking for this on Android (address bar, tabs and viewport). Habit Browser comes close but is not open source. Basically just a WebView with an address bar and tabs. If anyone has ideas, let me know.

Wait till someone points out that dev tools are not useful to the average user and should exist as a separate extension.

Where's the line?

The dev tools can be very useful to average users, even if they don't use them the same way that developers might.

For example, I know several non-technical users who use the built-in dev tools to remove the annoying overlays that some sites show, but that don't allow to be hidden without logging in or something dumb like that.

These users don't really know what the DOM is, but they do know that they can open the dev tools, click the node selection button, click on the overlay they want to get rid of, press the Delete key, and now they're able to use the site again.

Firefox's DevTools can render a whole web page as an image to disk (not just the visible viewport, like screenshot tools do). Quite a few non-developers have found that useful when I've showed this feature to them. No extensions or 3rd-party software required.

I don't know about that too, how can I do it?

Press Shift-F2 and at the prompt type "screenshot --clipboard --fullpage" to copy the current page to the clipboard.

> The dev tools can be very useful to average users

I think you missed the GP's point. Bookmarks can also be very useful to average users. One man's trash is another man's dev tools or whatever.

Drawing a clear line between what's essential for a browser and what's bloat probably isn't possible for any decent sized group of users.

The built-in dev tools are also a social-engineering attack vector. Try opening the dev tools on facebook.com and you'll see a huge warning to users that have been told to copy/paste malicious JavaScript into their dev tools. So one could make a reasonable argument that built-in dev tools are a bad thing.

Funnily enough, Facebook is one of the sites where I've seen these non-technical users have to use the dev tools to make the site usable again!

I think it was a login prompt overlay shown on business profile pages. These users didn't want to log in to Facebook, yet needed to view the business' Facebook page. The overlay would cover a significant portion of the page, without any good way to get rid of it. So the users would use the dev tools to clean up the page, essentially, even if they didn't really know what they were doing.

Why not Address bar and viewport. Dev tools are only useful to devs. Tabs should be handled by the window manager.

Removing tabs would be awful for an overwhelming majority of users who use platforms that are incapable of managing dozens of windows.

And, as an (occasional) i3 user, I would not want this, because two browser windows seem to use up far more resources than one window with two tabs. Browsers are almost unusable once a certain number of tabs are open; I can only imagine how badly my computer would operate were the 100+ tabs I have open each consuming the resources required by a separate window.

OK in that case may I keep my bookmarks, history, password management, download manager etc.

One person's bloat is another person's feature.

Changed my mind, I agree with the window manager thing and that dev tools should be separate. However, ubiquitous dev tools are really nice when, as a developer, you're trying to figure out why a page doesn't work for that one user that has 20 extensions and 5 viruses and you don't have to ask them to install anything extra.

Actually, the better option here is: "viewport and plugin manager". Install dev tools - or bookmarks, or whatever - if you want them, ignore them otherwise.

Anyway, you can already use uzbl[1] if you want something minimal.

[1] https://www.uzbl.org/

> I don't even want a bookmark manager built-in

No bookmarks? You mean one would have to type in every website address you want to go to?

It's so much easier to click on bookmark in the list, and with today's wide monitors, horizontal space is wasted anyway so I keep the bookmark sidebar open all the time.

I haven't used built-in bookmarks for years. If I really want to bookmark something, it goes in Pocket or Pinboard.

Browser history search via the address bar is much faster than searching through bookmark folders for a particular page. Even nicer with Vimium where I can just hit "o" and search for what I want. For everything else, I just Google.

> Browser history search via the address bar is much faster than searching through bookmark folders for a particular page.

History wasn't part of kgwxd's specification (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442292), though, which just brings back to the central point: when you try to build a browser with the absolute minimum set of features required, you'll find that everyone's minimum set of features is different.

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