Ask HN: What is the future of browsers?
I am trying to understand what features would be in next generation browsers? What would your favourite browsers look like?
- identity service
- payment services
- 3D positioning data, including 6DOF
- hand tracking and object tracking (AR)
In terms of future-y stuff, I can see some sort of blockchain integration, like CloudStorage as an IPFS version of LocalStorage. That would potentially need to dovetail with the identity and payment stuff.
I suspect as we get deeper into AR times, some kind of device-relative geo services will need to be necessary. Like, give me a list of services that are within 1 foot, 20 feet, and 1000 feet respectively.
Personally, I also think the browser is ready to make the leap to a kind of raw metal relationship with hardware. ChromeOS is an example of this, Firefox OS was an attempt. I'd like to see more specialized OS's that can boot hardware directly to the web. The security models on Mac and Windows are slowly approaching something more like the web anyway, where apps run in a sandbox. Web pages have been doing that forever, so it seems like a good fit for a security-conscious OS.
A mobile headset would be a good opportunity for such an OS to differentiate itself. Which leads me to...
The other huge opportunity I think is in web "filters". We've gotten to the point now that there's just a lot of crap out there, and with ad blockers and readability filters we've started to dabble in a meta layer. I think a future web browser will go full meta, where by default you don't see the actual web page, you see a thumbnail and a bunch of views on the data in that web page, and you only dip down into the giant messy interactive ad-riddled view if you want to.
Past endeavors include the whole space of web annotation, semantic web, etc. Not sure why none of that has taken off, but seems like something that will find product market fit eventually.
One of those "filters" could be an AR filter. Take a web page and map it into AR space. Also VR. Add avatars of other people around the content. But there should be a whole marketplace of filters, language translation, low power filter, etc. Opera was doing some version of that. You could have political filters too. "Block all misogyny", "Add Fox News' take", "Keep everything tidy and German" etc.
A lot of this marks a general transition from a site POV to a user POV for the browser.
If anyone wants consultation on any of these ideas, I'm available for hire. :)
The web browser is the only one who knows how much time I spend on each webpage and what I like inside each page. so it can optimize for that.
What we do now is "surf". We view info as pages, which are presentations constructed and filtered by someone else. What you're suggesting is that instead of surfing the surface, we could dive deep into the info-ocean and construct a presentation for ourselves. The future-browser is the tool to enable that.
I'm guessing that eventually we'll each have an AI that learns how we want to consume info; an AI that eventually becomes an assistant. She will become the layer between us and the info-ocean, filtering, organizing and presenting, and even suggesting, guiding and teaching. She know our interests and habits, read our emails, and take our phone calls. She may be owned and controlled by a corporation, like Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assist. Or maybe we'll be able to construct our own AI-assistant, integrated into our browser/phone/AR-headset.
Right now we're the fish, hooked by advertising and branding schemes coated with a layer of technology. Someday maybe some fish can hide behind a technology layer of their own.
It's quite obvious that they will all implement next JS standards, with some experiments here and there.
They will add API access to more hardware like VR helmets, controllers, maybe even USB devices (which would be great for web hardware based security, like 2FA).
Probably voice control and typing (like on Android).
Probably automatic translation (not just by Google).
Built-in free VPN (limited obviously) and TOR would be nice.
I'm sick of having to choose between either Firefox, Edge, or a thousand Chrome knockoffs. There needs to be more diversity.
Ability to set ceiling for memory usage and bandwidth per tab. It has traditional boxy 1990's style design, a traditional File, Edit, etc., none of this hamburger menu crap. It suspends or kills background tabs.
An empty browser uses 1MB of memory or less. A full browser never uses more than 256MB of memory.
In addition to JavaScript, it supports a compiled language out of the box, like Java, but open source, secure, and non-bloated.
It has "skinny goggles" which let you trim the fat from webpages, removing unnecessary CPU, bandwidth and memory usage while keeping the site readable.
Audio and video content is blocked in each tab until you specifically allow it.