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Comment by curioussavage | Hacker News Reader

What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think any of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this point. Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought.

I want really good tab management built in through some kind of workspace. I want something more than just profiles a workspace should be kind of like an editor workspace and provide different tools to help you be productive.

A minimal UI and user configurable keyboard shortcuts would be great too.

I wish I had written down more of my thoughts but I think to sum it up - all browsers are trying to compete for the average customer. I would pay money for a power user/developer focused browser.

For now I’m trying to customize qutebrowser to get closer to what I want.

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>What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think any of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this point. Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought.

Big browsers are fine, you absolutely can browse with a keyboard in vimperator/pentadactyl/tridactyl without touching a mouse in months (I do). Other users above/below suggested vimium and vimperator-style extensions, and just look at the difference. Vimium is simple and works great in 9/10 cases, but there's always that one little element or a quirk where it doesn't work. Vimperator and its descendants work everywhere, but they often require a lot of manual labor and workarounds just to be able to put the mouse away. And the difference between 90% and 100% keyboard browsing is massive (no context switching).

Thing is, the modern web itself is super hostile to the keyboard control and power users, I don't think this has anything to do with browsers.

I'm always surprised Twitter still has j/k navigation for tweets despite its ongoing purge of the developer ecosystem.

> you absolutely can browse with a keyboard in vimperator/pentadactyl/tridactyl

> Vimperator and its descendants work everywhere

Vimperator at least has been dead for years, ever since Firefox Quantum. The switch to WebExtensions was too much, and not everything could be converted anyway. Don't know about the others you've listed.

Vim Vixen is the closest I've found for the majority of my uses.

This is taking Tridactyl into account?

It is possible to write extensions (aka WebExtensions Experiments) which are pretty much as powerful as the old Addons; the cost is that one can run them only with Developer/Beta/Aurora release of Firefox and there are no guarantees for stability of internal Firefox APIs [0][1][2].

So I managed to write a proof of concept extesion [3] which exposes API to create sequence keyboard shortcuts (eg. Ctrl+x Ctrl+c in emacs) and creates bindings to Awesome Bar prefixes for filtering suggestions [4]. Although it is heavy experimental by now.

I suppose it may be pretty easy from here to add a feature for managing all the built-in shortcuts and commands of the browser.

Besides I think there are some effords to improve shortcuts stuff in Firefox [5].

[0]: https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i... [1]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/e... [2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1397874 [3]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2va0icchtittbnx/shortcuts-experime... [4]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... [5]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1303384

> What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think any of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this point. Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought.

https://www.qutebrowser.org/

Have you tried this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

i tried all vim-like addons for firefox and none come close to what the old pentadactly did :(

i ended up with vim-vixen, but it's still missing a lot of functionality.

Tridactyl gives you Vim bindings in Firefox (Quantum)!

https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl

Some users are reporting that the site that hosts our beta builds is inaccessible. We're trying to figure out what's going on but in the meantime you might have better luck downloading it from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...

> user configurable keyboard shortcuts

This is one of those things that's sorely missing for me. Firefox has keyboard shortcuts for most things I want to do in it, but they're often really inconvenient and I'd like to be able to change them to match those in other tools I often use.

Some other things I'd love to see in a browser:

- A command palette to make functionality & shortcuts more discoverable

- Fuzzy tab search and switcher

- Customizable split panes

On the whole I think browsers could benefit a lot by learning from UX patterns in modern editors like Atom/VSCode.

command palettes are some of the most powerful new UI designs that I've seen in recent history. PyCharm + VS Code both are immediate go-to's for me because I know I'll be able to find a feature (and the keyboard shortcut!) super quickly when I need it.

Huge wins for discoverability and usability.

Shameless plug: I built something similar[0] a while ago, maybe it's useful for you.

By default it does fuzzy tab search, (multi) selection and closing. The new advanced mode[1] turns it into something more like Quicksilver, with object->action->optional-param command sequences.

It's only on the Chrome extension marketplace, although it should be mostly compatible with Firefox.

[0] https://github.com/brumm/tabulous

[1] https://i.imgur.com/IaksQ9m.gifv

It always gets me that both Firefox and Chrome both refuse to provide the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts. Sure, it's probably a bad idea to allow users to change them, but provide some easier way to do it than hacking source, please.

I've been wondering whether there's possibility of a "browser" being something other than an "application". In general I like my software decomposed into actions that I can recompose as I wish in the shell. For something as generic as "web browser" I'm not (yet?) sure what that looks like - actually experimenting seems like a lot of work.

Something along those lines was also on my (more vague) list of goals: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-...

At least in my mind that would involve a kind of holding space separate from files (but serving some of those purposes). It's going to involve a lot of large, structured data, remote resources, and potentially "live" entities (like an open tab). All of which are still manipulable entities, but they need representations and a place to exist.

Very much in line with what I'm thinking - we should grab (logical?) beers sometime :)

In the space of "live" entities, I played a bit with something I called "genies" (out of a notion that they were "a kind of daemon" or "something that's not quite a daemon", depending on where you drew lines) where a long-running process would register itself with your shell before backgrounding, and then you could make requests of it at leisure and possibly poll in your PROMPT_COMMAND. There's a lot of potential ecosystem I haven't really fleshed out, but I did put together a libpurple client that worked that way (with a UX very much inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System)

Are you maybe picturing something like Plan9's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor), but with the panes being webviews instead of text buffers?

Maybe? Not from a visual perspective, but there may well be overlap in other dimensions - I understand Acme exposes a programmatic interface?

The UX I'm picturing is a suite of individual commands that can run from the shell against the current "state of the page", some of which would produce a display in either the shell or a separate window. One of those might be of the form of "render the whole page" but it could be less privileged a view than it is in existing browsers.

Regarding "workspaces", I find Tree Style Tabs be essential for organizing sets (and subsets) of tabs.

(I think that Tree Style Tabs change tab handling so much to the better that it's completely worth a native implementation as a part of the browser. That would be a killer feature.)

What do you feel like you're missing in qutebrowser? I've been using it for about a year now and it's been the perfect answer for me.

I really, really miss the keyboard and overall flexibility that Opera 12 provided, back in the day. With that and being able to manage a crazy amount of tags beyond giving advanced tab management was really amazing for power users.

The workspace specific functionality is an interesting idea though.

Incidentally, Vivaldi comes the closest.

Have you looked into Saka? It makes a lot of browser functions available from the keyboard.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saka/

I dont have a lot of experience with alternatives, but I have been pretty happy with luakit for a keyboard based browser.

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