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How to Build a Better Browser
TuringTest writes "Interface designer and IE ex-developer Scott Berkun
writes an essay on basic principles of web browser design, moved by the recent presence of Firefox and Opera in the headlines. Gives plenty of design constraints and guidelines, some insightful, some debatable. Personally some features that I'd like to see in my browser include colaborative filtering (a.k.a. del.icio.us integration), a unified tool for history+bookmarks in a single list (filtered by keyword tags), and automatic generation of keywords for the bookmarked pages (something that Open Text Summarizer can do)."
bookmarks, if they were searchable i think that would be a big improvement. i collect so many they get hard to manage.
I think a better bookmark managment system needs to be implemented, especially when you move from office to home to mobile. possibly network storage system to publish your bookmarks so your browser can grab them automatically?
I'm pretty thrilled with plugins for Firefox and the potential that exists there. As web applications grow in popularity, I'm hoping that software vendors will offer Firefox plugins alongside or instead of ActiveX components.
I'm wondering how much you can change browser interfaces these days. There hasn't been that much new in interface design since the days of netscape (tabbed browsing being a notable exception)
The links provided are very slow... here are normal ones.
Scott Berkun
basic principles of web browser design
del.icio.us integration
unified tool
Open Text Summarizer
The article is a good primer for people who haven't done much research regarding browser feature development, but doesn't offer anything terribly insightful or innovative. Really nice photography though. :)
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I would like to see password management implemented for specific websites instead of in general. There are some sites I want my password saved on (i.e. online newspapers) and some I don't (i.e. my webmail). Maybe this is possible already, but there is no obvious way to do it that I've found.
it'd be nice to see a "history browser" window, with the ability to sort, view and search previously visited pages. could have multiple views, like detail, and thumbnail
...by a former developer of Internet Explorer. Isn't that a little like taking marriage counseling from Scott Peterson?
It's disconcerting to see Microsoft paying attention to the sort of features available in Firefox and Opera. We all know what happens when Microsoft starts "addressing" the competition.
Personally, I find Firefox's community oriented approach to extensions and plugins refreshing, but it's hard to compete with a paid team of guys who managed to pass Microsoft's crazy hiring tests. As a Linux user, I fear this will mean my web browsing experience will fall yet farther behind that of my friends and co-workers.
Developers should see this as a call-to-arms. If Microsoft pursues feature extensions in earnest, it may well overrun open source efforts. That would be a disaster given the progress Firefox has made in terms of marketshare and acceptance so far.
A Proud Member of the Reality Oriented Community.
It's called Firefox.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
You mean to tell me that the IE developers didn't focus on security???
NOW you tell me !!!
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
You mean like adhering to the W3C standards? You mean like not having your own proprietary code floating about?
Start with those two issues then get back to me.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Intelligent bookmark management: "Now your spouse can PROVE how much porn you look at."
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Wouldn't it be cool to subscribe to a series of links of similar interest that once you were done reading the page all you did was click next and it took you to the next site... sorta like a web chauffeur? No having to hung links down... no having to choose where to go next... just sit back and enjoy...
I know what's on your hard dr
Anyone wanna post a link for people like myself who are behind corporate firewalls that wont allow access out on 8000whatever ports?
I want to be able to search the browser cache, since that's where pages I've recently visited can be found. Sure, I can grep the directory, but this really should be integrated into the browser.
You mean like Safari?
This is...
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The problem with bookmarks is that they are tied down to one computer! I have to maintain two different lists at work and at home. Not to mention when I'm over at a friend's house and I'm trying to remember the url for one of them. I've found breasy.com to be a good solution. Could this be done in a Firefox plugin somehow? I suppose you need a central db to make it happen. Will the tinfoil hat crowd shy away from this?
Have you ever asked yourself, Is It Normal?.
searchable bookmarks
evil is as evil does
While I'm actually relatively indifferent if someone's site uses Javascript or DHTML that Firefox doesn't support, it is aggravating to have a single, badly-coded web page take out that browser window and everything else I was tabbing to at that moment, especially if I hadn't bookmarked what I was looking at. In this sense, Firefox has unwittingly upped the ante on application crashes, since you're more likely to have more pages browsed to at any given moment than with MSIE.
Don't get me wrong: I love Firefox and I have no plans to switch back to MSIE. But I would definitely suggest one of Firefox's greatest weaknesses would be the stability issue. At this point, anything to prevent the browser from utterly disappearing when it hits a malformed (or whatever) page would be a welcome addition to the code.
Plugins are the bain of the web. The web is about delivering content to the browser and enabling the user to view the content as desired. Plugins, are the realm of over zealous 'web designers' and marketing types who cloud content with branding dogma.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I can't look at the article because:
Access Denied by SmartFilter: Forbidden, this page (http://www.uiweb.com.nyud.net:8090/about.htm) is categorized as: Anonymizer/Translator.
I love my job.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Help fight continental drift.
Ummm... do you mean to say that developing IE drove him out of software development altogether?
I currently use SQUID as a 'personal' proxy. Logging my navigation habits with the referer field to reconstruct the browsing path.
Bookmarks, are not enough.
When will tabbed browsing be added to IE? Not that it really matters for me much as Firefox is the only browser for me!
This article is unbearable to read: "One the one hand", "odds are slim you'll find develop features", "asnwers", plus unreadable awkward sentence structure....
Web annotation with Wikalong. shameless plug
I'd like to see a searchable history feature. I may hit 500 web pages in a day, and trying to remember on what page I read something can be a maddening experience. It would be great to be able to search the cache.
Lighter, Faster, Stronger. We Can Rebuild It. I would (like many others here apparantly) would like to see a good built-in bookmark manager. This bookmark manager should be intuitive enough to figure out how to categorize the link that you chose, and if not, perhaps with a little nudging. I am reminded of a product that I use to filter my e-mails in Outlook, spamBayes - it read some samples of junk mail, and it got increasingly better and is currently filtering 99% of my spam. So why not create an intelligent filter for bookmarks? Sidebars take up wasted web space real-estate that could be used to show content on an actual page, rather than useless links that no one clicks on at the side. I know - I did one of those old channel push" links you used to see in IE 4.0 - no one wanted content pushed down their throats. Maybe as I mentioned above, building sidebars with some intelligence (frequently accessed links) might be useful. Better, more robust P2P technology might also be an option. I don't think the general consumer is aware of IRC. And of course don't forget the now ubiquitous tabs. It now hurts me when I (have to, on occasion) use IE and "Launch a New Window".
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
For example, If I do a search for 802.11g router reviews, go to smallnetbuilder.com, then go to say Netgear and back then go to another generalized info site, the history would show from the google search which links I followed to info, as opposed to commercial sites, as opposed to junk. Hell, it doesn't even need to be graphical. It could even prioritize by something like time spent there, or depth of links followed.
Let's get our priorities straight here! I NEED a browser that will cover the tracks of my pornsurfing with just the press off a button. Just a big red panic button that will wipe out all cookies, history, pic cache related to smut. What browser developer can deliver this!? I must know!
So the time that any browser is finally 'perfect', is likely the same time that WWW browsing is obsoleted by other means of using the 'net.
The history of mankind is a long record of obstacles placed in the way of the more efficient for the benefit of the less efficient. -Ludwig von Mises
It's a funny thing: any web programmer sees any web browser as a programming platform, not an app. But at the same time the rest of the planet sees the web browser, and most web sites, as just another kind of application. The conflict makes browser design tough: it's impossible to invest in the end-user experience and the developer experience to everyone's satisfaction (a burden consumer OS developers have). Hell, even if you were only trying to do one of those two things, you still wouldn't be able to do it to everyone's satisfaction.
This dichotomy exists, but does it necessarily mean that you cannot incorporate the two? "Programming Features" can be made transparent to the user -- only web programmers need to be familiar with them. The user doesn't care what browser or document properties you can access... all they want to see is content. So let's say you had a really good developer engine in the background - the user doesn't need to see that.
Furthermore in today's web-browsing experience you cannot divorce one from the other. A web browser HAS to be a programming platform if it needs to support things like DHTML or run Javascript. Saying that it's difficult to do, is no excuse.
Or maybe I'm reading this wrong.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Fun aside, that's a real problem with current interface designs. Online bookmark sites manage this by adding a "private" checkbox to entries, but I would like to see a more fine-grained publishing classification (i.e. personal, for friends, for work, for the world).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The one thing I'd like to see is a spelchkr and grammer checkar build right into the browser.
Wooden that be kool?
One thing I would like is a better way to store those bookmarks that I use frequently and those that I stored as a temporary marker to a page I found interesting for a while and then never visited again. Currenly I have a scratch folder for these items, but I don't see why all bookmarks need to be euqaul - why couldn't we have tags for bookmarks so I could amrk soem as IMPORTANT - KEEP FOREVER and some as TEMP which could then be hidden once I hadn't used them for a certain time and only caled up again when I wanted to see them. It would keep my menu bars more manageable.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Kindly allow me to run more than one copy of the browser, please!
I have three screens, each with its own root window. Mozilla will only allow me to run one copy, and is only smart enough to attach to one root window. Thus I can only have browser windows on one screen at a time.
A standardized rendering engine. Its not like different browsers need to render pages differently. Wouldn't it be smart to just make all browsers render things in exactly the same manner? Wouldn't the best way to do this be the implementation of a standardized rendering engine?
This is the kind of project that the W3C needs to take on right now, and then IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.. could all be on equal footing. Web designers/developers could sleep easier knowing that no matter what they do, its all going to look and operate the same no matter what the end user is browsing with.
I wonder if FireFox' crashes have to do with stupid web pages with embedded active X controls, dumb implementations of Java because they have been DESIGNED to be used on IE. Don't you just LOVE when you get those web pages that say you MUST use IE to view this webpage?
I will take FireFox' instability(FOR NOW), tabbed browsing, and speed, over the insecure, slow IE any day.
There are a number of features that have not made it into mainstream browsers yet. IE is obviously lacking in security due to its implementation, although the concept of different security levels that can be set on a site by site basis is a good one. Omniweb's ability to edit HTML files "in place" is incredibly useful for fixing broken sites on the fly when you really need to use something that is is served while non-functional. Several browsers have implemented a "right click to never see ads from here again" feature that is indispensable once you have used it. Mainly, however, what we need is a push for open standards so that all of the different browsers (coming soon to your phone, toothbrush, toaster, etc.) will all work on all sites. This last feature will only happen when IE is dethroned. Whether or not this will come to pass, is pretty uncertain at this point.
- Stability
- Security, resistance to malice (especially remote)
- Guarding privacy
- Speed/performance
I tend to think about software on a Maslow's hierarchy model; you need those basics - so the software runs properly, and securely. Then work your way up to the nifty features.firefox needs to handle bad pages a bit more gracefully, when i open PDF's up in FF, it locks up almost every time.
also i have seen FF is a memory WHORE, browsing with it open for a few hours leaves you with 100's of MB of memory usage, that is bad
Those features are nice. And I'm sure that most people on slashdot would benefit from them greatly. But for normal people, it wont help. My parents I switched to linux. And they enjoy the obvious benefits like not crashing and no spyware. And they've been using firefox even longer than they've been using linux. And they still dont' understand tabbed browsing, why its better. They don't organize bookmarks into folders. They really just don't care about efficient use of the computer. It takes me about 5 seconds to accomplish what it takes them an hour to do, and they don't care. They have the features and the power available to them to imporove their computing experience and do things faster and more efficiently. But they don't do it.
So for nerds like you and me this stuff rules. But leave it to firefox extensions. If you put it in the base package it will only confuse normal folk. You have to stick to things that are obviously better and things that my parents will use. Like the google search box.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It's been a long time since I really bothered with these things. Aroung 1996/7 I used to have an extensive collection of well organized bookmarks. Everybody did in those days - there were even lots of personal web sites that were basically bookmarks. I found I didn't use them very often (except maybe to show them to somebody else) and then address completion came along in the address bar. IIRC, Netscape had the simple version, IE had a full drop down with history. These days I just start typing and select what I want. It's faster than hunt-and-peck through the bookmarks menus.
One the one hand, they're supposed to be lightweight little programs that just let you view websites, and on the other, they carry the same burdens as operating systems and application suites, trying to provide everything to everyone. Here in this little essay I explain what I know about designing browsers.
He can't properly construct a sentence that requires the intelligence of a 3rd grader, but he is "Mr. Browser," at least to Slashdot..?
Now, do you guys really use bookmarks? I mean - yeah - sometimes we all stumble on something cool but (after a couple approaches) I find it's more bother than use to try and keep them organized. I just keep half a dozen maybe on my toolbar and put temporary links there also. Bookmarks? I feel I can fish out a page faster using search engine(s). Also - bookmarks become obsolete, search engines generally find working pages.
If you don't like it, then you probably shouldn't use it.
I agree. When I used to code IE specific pages, I made extensive use of IE's filters (they use DirectX). You could use them, or combine them for some pretty neat effects. I once made a page that had some pretty neat gradient fading effects, animations, and background music loops -- all in DHTML using IE filters. People used to ask me if I was using Flash, and they would be suprised when I told them that it was just HTML. Of course, it was just an experiment I tried. The problem was that when you tried to render a bunch of elements, it started getting very slow.
I would REALLY like to see some standardized transition effects of filters. I guess I could learn Flash, but why not do it through Javascript and HTML on the browser? It's less overhead.
I hope this is something the Firefox team will consider -- to figure out a platform independent way to implement Microsoft-like filters.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
That's different from a normal rim job how?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
That's already a solved problem. Check Furl, Spurl, del.icio.us (which have the further benefit of an emergent collaborative filtering system).
Better bookmark managment systems need to be implemented indeed, but the problem is far deeper. I wouldn't be satisfied with less that what Integrated Back, History and Bookmarks describes: most visited pages bookmarked automatically and shown in the history list, filtering by frequency of visits, thumbnails.
I would implement that system myself as a Firefox extension, but sadly I lack the developing skill with the Mozilla base code.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I want my browser to remember by last session (if I tell it to). Opera does this, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Often when I am at the office (with a laptop), I have a browser with "X" number of tabs open. Sometimes I want to close the browser, go home, and finish what I was doing. I hate closing the browser and all tabs down and then either having to bookmark each page and then load them back up, or just remember the links, or leave the laptop on in my bag. I want it to load everything up that I had on my screen the last time so I can keep resarching with a doobie in my mouth. C'mon Firefox!
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Firefox
I've seem quirks in Firefox where it will not display a page correctly, but I can't remember a time it ever crashed, prevented me from doing something I wanted to do, or otherwise caused me to waste time repeating something I'd already done. I can't say any of this about MSIE (on Mac or Windows), or even Safari on OSX.
I've found that both FF and Safari do things I'd rather they didn't, so I switch between them based on their strengths. In a world written for MSIE, I reckon that's the best you can do. Still, on their worst day I haven't experienced the problems with either of these browsers that I had with Explorer.
they should be. Make "ranking" an option but record an index of ALL printed words (besides and, or stuff like that). Many times I've been searching for something and found something else not related but mildly interesting (or not obvious in its relation) and couldn't find it the next day save for maybe a topic or phrase that was unrelated to the original search.
But if firefox allows malformed (or whatever) pages , like you say, wouldnt that lead to less stability in the application(as in browser crashing trying to render weird page and etc) instead of more?
I think you misunderstand the author when he calls security and stability "red herrings". We're speaking theoretically on web browser design - the author basically claims that if security and stability ever become major marketing points, then the whole market has failed to meet minimal standards. "security and stability" are basically a given once you are talking about UI design.
The fact that Firefox can gain ground on IE based on security (spyware, exploits) shows that IE isn't meeting basic software quality control. The fact that Gecko still has rendering issue is the same. The fact that both MS and Mozilla.org think of these things as advocacy issues (Make spyware illegal! Stomp out IE specific pages!) only ignores the problem.
The other advantage that IE has in this area is that it can be run as multiple concurrent processes. Even if one crashes, the others survive. Mozilla Suite -> Firefox + Thunderbird + etc is a _vast_ improvement, but with the advent of tabbed browsing, there is unfortunately a diminishing return to allowing multiple instances of Firefox.
Yeah, I want a browser that does one thing, and one thing well: browse the web. Extra features should be done with extensions and plugins.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
...write articles on how to do it.
It gets more true every day.
Firefox as far as I have seen and seen from others using is rock solid if you do a couple of things:
- If you used any pre-release version, uninstall the previous version. Key/value pair settings can and do change causing erronious behavior. This can get goofy on Linux but you can minimize the goofiness by hanging onto backups of the ".mozilla" directory and carefully pushing in stuff you need. Of course my preference is to export the booksmarks and start over.
- Plug-ins are "the heel" for any browers including Firefox. Limit the usage of plug-ins to a bare minimum and definately don't install plug-ings you feel iffy about. If the plug-in goes south then it often has an effect on the framework. As a tangent to the first point, using pre-release FF version of a plug-in is also a receipe for disaster.
Purely anectdotal, FF seems rock solid. You can also make IE extra flakey by installing all sorts of weird things as well (the last time IE crashed it came from the Google toolbar!). At this point it seems that both products are rock solid frameworks where most problems come in from the outside.
Imagine that everyone got a free TeeVee with every home/apartment. Now imagine that anyone with a bit of time could create a TeeVee station that worked with the free TeeVee. The people who didn't know what they were doing would make their stations compatible with the free TeeVee because they have it, and so does everyone they know.
Then their boss at work says, "make a TeeVee station to display information about our department." Because they all have the free TeeVee at work, that's what they use to view their station.
Finally, some upstarts (long-haired, unwashed, obviously communist, punks) say, "Hey, we have a TeeVee that is also free, but it is UHF/VHF compliant, and you won't get all those annoying commercials and stuff! Oh and people won't break into your home if you watch certain stations!
The masses look at these upstarts with wonder and bewilderment. Just what is this UHF/VHF that they're talking about? All they want to do is watch TeeVee, and what they have works fine. Oh sure, every once in a while, Cousin Midge's son (who is a TeeVee wiz) comes by and complains that there is always a nest of mice or other creatures in the living room ("They get in via the TeeVee," he says), but he always cleans them out and you give him a fivver for his troubles. Sometimes the TeeVee doesn't work, but if you wack it on the side enough times, it usually straightens out, but it seems...slow lately.
Yeah, right.
This is probably a very important quote, and is very true. Us geeks may rant about the security of Firefox compared to IE, its not whats going to help win over users. Its like Bush vs Kerry. Kerry would not win JUST because he was "anti-bush", because thats the nature of opposition.
Have a nice day!
Spellbound
-- by anon
I have a spelling chequer,
It cam with my PC;
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks I can knot sea.
Eye ran thi poem threw it,
your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when aye rime.
Each frays come posed uup on my screen
Eye trussed to bee a joule
The checker poured o'er every word
To checque sum spelling rule.
Be fore a veiling checkers
Hour spelling mite decline,
And if were lacks or have it laps,
We wood be maid to wine.
Butt now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know faults with in my cite,
Of none eye am a ware.
Now spelling does knot phase me,
It does knot bring a tier.
My pay purrs awl due glad den
With wrapped words fare as hear.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud.
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaws are knot aloud.
Sew ewe can sea why aye dew prays
Such soft ware for pea seas,
And why I brake in two averse
By righting wants to pleas.
Do you have some examples of sites which crash firefox? I keep firefox open all day every day at work and browse many sites, i now have 20+ tabs open with different sites and i never encounter a crash..
I can't speak for IE tho, i've never used it as a primary browser.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
from the site: http://delicious.mozdev.org.nyud.net:8090/ categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.
....
So something like http://stumbleupon.com/
http://shutterbug27.stumbleupon.com/
Striving to be common...
http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/
Its a bunch of extensions for firefox. Includes 'x':
x provides a toolbar button (which you can place wherever you wish via View > Toolbars > Customize... - it's labelled "Paranoia") from which you can quickly clear privacy sensitive data, specifically: history, form info, saved passwords, download history, cookies, and the cache (both disk and in memory cache).
Of course its indiscriminate and will hence wipe out all your non-pron data too. So do all your pron surfing with a different (expendable) firefox profile
I would like the "browser" to be decomposed into its simple components, which are available to any app. So the "HTTP" component is available (like wget) to any app that calls it, like fopen() now. And the "HTML" component is available, like htmlRenderer = new HTMLRenderer(htmlDocument). And the MIME lookup, JavaScript interpreter, and other components are all available via API to any calling program. Then we can not only get "innovative" new browers, with exciting or satisfying new features, but integrate them into our own apps.
I know GNOME and KDE each have "get URL" and MIME management components. I also remember all that BS from Microsoft's Internet takeover about "IE is part of the OS". But the right way to include the Internet in a distributed platform would let me open an XML app definition, which would glue together whichever network/data, logic and presentation/GUI components were installed, into a task-specific application. If browser developers were contributing more to the platform infrastructure, rather than exclusively to their pet monolithic application, that day would be here sooner. And we'd all be able to build the real apps on that flexible, complete, and simply customizable platform.
When you're done reading this book, think about what kind of project will be most productive when you contribute your code. Backfilling the holes in the Web platform left by the blind rush of the Web bubble is satisfying as a developer, and enables a better development and business environment. Change the world with gcc!
--
make install -not war
Isn't it about time we can add sites to our bookmark folder and have them automagically categorised based on content?
Eg. I bookmark Slashdot and it gets added to a News folder, I bookmark Google and it gets added to a Search Engine folder.
Of course this relies on the webpage having metadata that is accurate. But it's a good start.
Would also like to see website history categorised like this. So I can go to a local webpage which lists all the sites I've been on, but can sort them by interest group.
An "Interface designer and IE ex-developer" ... (we all know about that browser). Is making suggestions about how we can build a better browser? Given the security history and general stagnation of the browser he helped to develop - should we really be following his advice on how to build a better one?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
There's wasabi involved.
And what is the point anyway? For all of my common sites, I easily remember the URL, and certainly don't need extra buttons cluttering the UI.
That comment is lame. about:cache is integrated int o firefox, but it doesn't allow to search for web pages content, which was grandparent's post request.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
There are a few things that are keeping me on Opera. One of them is the ability to resume where you left off after a crash. Seeing that Opera crashes on occasion, this is a necessary thing. If you have 6 tabs open when it crashes, when you restart it you can choose to have it "continue from last time" and it will re-open all of those tabs.
Other things keeping Opera as my primary browser:
Mouse gestures - they just aren't as polished in Mozilla/Firefox.
Being able to close all tabs and not close the browser. I hate accidentally closing the last tab in Firefox and having the browser close.
Ability to identify itself as another browser - really only helpful from some asinine IE-only pages.
Configurability - I like the way in which Opera allows you to configure things.
Pop-ups. I like the way Opera does it better than Moz/Firefox.
Some things that Opera needs to work on:
Stability - still too many crashes. And it can freak out and eat all my CPU, and I have to kill it.
I do like the "line tracing" ability for Moz/Firefox mouse gestures. It is reinforcing to see them, so you don't get sloppy in using them.
Gripes for both:
Why did you move "Preferences" from under "Edit" to "Tools"? That is something that always bugged me about IE, now everyone does it. Arghh.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Standards-compliance isn't web compatibility, and the standards suck anyway. Worst of all, they keep rewriting the fucking things. What good is a "standard" that is constantly changing?
What you need to do is be compatible with as many existing pages as possible, and that includes a certain measure of bug-compatibility with old favored test platforms.
Making up new standards along more sensible lines does absolutely no good when it's imperative that you conform to older expectations. It just introduces new requirements to pile on top of the old ones.
What the standards bodies should be doing is cataloging all of the existant HTML functions you have to implement for a decent browser, and pointing out a handful of rare ones that might work with certain browsers, but HTML writers should avoid, not snobbishly writing a standard that requires the whole fucking web to be rewritten to conform to their aesthetic sensibility of a good standard.
Oh, but that would be practical, useful work, not a fun anal-retentive geek power trip. Who wants to do that?
Way back during the IE4 betas there was a feature called Microsoft Wallet, that offered websites a payment API: sites could ask the browser for payment, and the user would be prompted to select a credit card from their "wallet". For a bunch of reasons this feature was pulled from IE5
The fact that this guy talks about IE4 like it was some sort of perfectly halcyon browser makes me shiver. In fact, there were very good reasons to remove this feature, and saying that it should exist is akin (but not the same) to saying "Boy, I wish someone would get on that whole anti-gravity thing", in that the security ultimately does need to derive from the user, and users are... (I've worked in tech support so perhaps I may be a little biased) users are... a way to put it nicely... prone to fits of insanity perhaps.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
The problem with bookmarks is that they are tied down to one computer! I have to maintain two different lists at work and at home. Not to mention when I'm over at a friend's house and I'm trying to remember the url for one of them.
Agreed -- bookmarks must be machine-independent, internet-based.
I rolled my own solution, pretty easy:
* While browsing, click Favelet to pop up window with form, auto fill-in of URL/Title of browsed page.
* Form submits to database (PHP/ASP/JSP/CGI).
* Tweak database for cross-reference by topic, etc.
* PHP/ASP/JSP/CGI pages to get URL/Title back out of database.
Works like a charm, nicely searchable.
-kgj
-kgj
That is what desktop search is for!
There's no technical reason that a browser can't send a user's zipcode as part of the HTTP header, informing any website of where the user currently is. It would allow weather and news sites to provide more useful information without the user having to do anything.
Really, can't this guy think big? What's the use of a zip code?
How about send your SSN witch will allow a lookup in a centralized database that has all your credit card info in it.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Fair point.
Browsers get fed, essentially, random data from untrusted sources. To produce an inherently stable and secure browser, ALL data should be treated as broken and/or malicious until shown to be otherwise.
A key test would be; construct a large (2-3 Gigs) file full of mostly valid, but partially malformed / misaligned HTML/xhtml. Feed that to the browser.
It shouldn't crash, it _should_ gracefully decline to continue once it either runs low on resource, or gets stuck on nonsense markup. It should then release the resource, and you should be able to continue.
I doubt ANY current browser could pass that test.
And no, thats not a sensible real-world test. The best QA tests aren't; you test for the unreasonable to (to some degree) assure yourself the resonable will be OK. (I used to do QA, and that IS how you do it right...)
There is an extension for Firefox called Session Saver which was hacked to allow for better session restoration, but it's still too buggy to rely on. e.g. If you crash while a popup window with no chrome is active, you'll have a screwed up UI on restart; have to go digging through configfiles to fix it.
Power to the Peaceful
You publish your bookmarks.
Then you run a program that compares your bookmarks to other people's bookmarks, and the closest 5 matches come up. Then you recieve the websites they have in their bookmarks. For the most part you may be getting nonsense, but maybe you'd find some links you'd be interested in.
God spoke to me.
I'd rather have the browser crash than the whole OS. But unless things are really borked - especially ones with heavy Java use, I hardly see crashes on FF. IE on the other hand takes down the entire system on the same pages.
One that doesn't get /.'d
PDF in browsers is almost invariably the Adobe Plugin's problem. That thing is scary
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I am pretty sure there is a FireFox plugin too
IE is a product that stifled and almost derailed an entire industry with its lack of innovation and ill-conceived security policies (Active X anyone?). IMO, IE ranks down there with the worst user interfaces and user interaction policies ever conceived. Its even below Word with its default setting; "magically change dropdown menus just to annoy me."
Is this guy the moron that decided that the URL textbox should wipe out the contents of what you are typing if a page decides to load midway through entering your URL?
Opera has a nice feature where if it crashes, it still resumes your session. If you accidentally close the program, when it opens you return right where you left off. It's really handy, even when the program crashes it's no more of a hassle than having a single click to re-launch the program.
Crashing is bad, but the fact the browser loses all state information (what pages you are on, etc) makes it far worse.
Here is what the browser should do:
1. Have the history file have an "actively viewed" flag for the page. Have the history file updated with the new page as soon as it is displayed.
2. When you leave a page, the browser unsets the "actively viewed" flag.
3. When the browser crashes, see if any pages were actively being viewed and display those, instead of the default page.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I export my bookmarks to a file, and then set that file to my "home" button. It may not be the most fancy solution, but it gets the job done. I can search my bookmarks with any old browser. Check out the exported bookmarks from mozilla, it's a nice web format.
The last time I looked at Firefox (month or two ago) it still couldn't continue download, neither can Internet Explorer or most other browsers. Wget on the other side is continuing my downloads since well back in something like 1998, probally even before that, why havn't the browsers still catched up after six years? I mean its not that difficult to implement and at least Firefox already keeps track of the past downloads, so continuing them would be pretty much trivial.
.dvi/.ps/.pdf available (happens more often then one thinks) there is no way to get that completly downloaded and/or printed with todays browser or at least only with LOTS of manual clicking.
Another feature I miss is the ability to mass-download and print multiple webpages at once, ie. when you have a latex2html converted latex document with no
And yet another feature is the ability to browse directories, if there is a directory full of images I would like the browser to automatically generate me a thumbnail galery of those on demand, not just the boring default directory listing that is generated by the server.
As a sidenote, some of the above feature could only be relativly hackishly be implemented due to the lack of features in HTTP/HTML, which will provides little or no hints on what webpages belong together and doesn't as far as I know provide any way to browse directories. Link-feature that is present since HTML2 or so helps a bit, but since most browser have ignored that feature or are still ignoring it, its beside from some automatically generated webpages hardly used at all on the web.
This was my EXACT complaint with IE. I used to browse with IE and often would open a link in a new window. Sometimes I'd open another browser instance (actually click the icon and start browsing). If I would go to a site that crashed IE all windows from that instance (the chain of "open links in new window") would also just disappear, although any windows from a different instance would remain open. So this problem is definately not exclusive to Firefox or even tabbed browsing
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Check out www.sitebar.org for the solution to your bookmark woes.
it is aggravating to have a single, badly-coded web page take out that browser window and everything else I was tabbing to at that moment
I agree about this, despites what anyone might try to say and regardless how much/less stable IE is, Firefox has still got crash bugs. At least Opera admits their program might occasionally crash despite them trying their best to avoid that, and have implemented a feature so when you launch the browser after a crash, you're presented with a dialog essentially saying "Opera crashed, do you wish to restore the tabs?"
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Given that the article's author is not one of "the guys who think tabbed browsing isn't useful or desired by user", because he doesn't work in IE no more.
When this guy worked in IE there wasn't tabbed browsing in any major browser, and IE v4.0 was a very good tool for it's time, so I thinkg it's pretty obvious who's incorrect.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
That's not full-text search, only meta-data search.
Simpy does both for you: meta-data from web page authors, full-text search, as well as meta-data (read: tags) entered by the user himself.
Simpy
I'd be curious to see some examples. Also what version of Fx are you using?
I can count on one hand the sites that crash Fx, and I think most of them were due to malformed DHTML or Javascript.
The number of times IE has died on me and taken out 1 or more windows is far, far (did i say far?) greater.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
There's an extension for firefox called sessionsver that saves all the sites you were on when it crashes so they load back up when you open firefox again. It is really useful when i want to close firefox to install a new extension or something.
The process you describe to include metadata is what browsers should do, but bookmarks should not get sorted into hierarchical folders. A much better retrieval interface is with tags (i.e. search by keyword), like those in Gmail and the Epiphany browser.
With tags, archived objects can be located in several places at once. That way Slashdot would be under the "News, Technology and Geek" tags, and Google under the "Search, Engine, Tools, Internet" tags.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
My crashes so far with Firefox has unfortunately not been reproductible. Makes it harder to know what to report, besides letting it give talkback data. :-/
Here's a HTML page that's said to crash Firefox and all Mozilla browsers though:
a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); }
a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); }
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I personally have had enough of those "how to build a better" something articles.
Sorry... Trying again.
This code is said to crash Firefox,
and is reported as "working" on as late as Mozilla 1.8 alpha 4.
<HTML>
<SCRIPT> a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); } </SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT> a = new Array(); while (1) { (a = new Array(a)).sort(); } </SCRIPT>
</HTML>
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
No example sites which crash it simply by visiting?
For example, www.ev6.net crashes all versions of IE except the one in xp sp2
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There are one. It's called Spellbound though you have to open a separate window for it, you can't have it automaticly underline errors in the input box. If they fix that, I think we have the chance of seeing a great improvement of the spelling on the web. :)
"Do you have some examples of sites which crash firefox?"
Well yeah. Click "no" to the java warning, open one of the links on that page, and when you close the popup window, Firefox crashes. It's bug 273869, and that's just an example I found.
Search for the "crash" keyword in the Firefox product to get the full list of 303 other ways that Firefox crashes.
In response to other comments here, search on the "Tech evangelism" product to get a list of 3784 websites which don't render 'properly' in Mozilla.
See my blog posting from October. What browsers REALLY need is the ability to replace the most recently visited bookmark's URL with the URL of the currently-viewed page. That way you could stop and start reading (for instance, in a comic strip series) without having to create and delete a separate bookmark for each stopping place, and you could also comply with "site moved, please change your bookmark" notices without needing to go through an elaborate process to delete the old bookmark.
You can run many instances of Firefox, though you need them to use different profiles.
just make a *.bat-file containing the following: (without the quotes)
"""
c:
cd "c:\[program folder]\Mozilla Firefox\"
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
firefox -p
"""
It works perfectly for me.
Only morons and AOL users would watch porn through a browser. How utterly inconvienient.. Seasoned vetrans get all their *uummm* "sexual education" from USENET.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I'd imagine people who work pretty heavy in Microsoft have to be fairly web savvy. I wonder if most of them use Firefox outside of work... You know... to browse the web with a REAL browser.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
It grows irritating to have the Mozilla crowd peer down their noses and make ivory-tower statements about adhering to this W3C standard, or that other standard.
Out in the real world where real users live, there are such things as de-facto standards, ones that occur, say, because a player in the marketplace has a 95% share. While it may be true that IE has deficiencies with cascading style sheets and PNG files, but at the end of the day your browser has to just work, regardless of anything else.
Haughtily hiding behind W3C standards and demanding that the world change for you is not a plan for success.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
And how long does that take? The Opera search is instantaneous, I doubt that the Simpy one is as fast, even if it has cached copies of the web pages locally.
And, if it hasn't cached copies of the web pages locally what good is it? Content on the web changes, so what's on a page one day won't necessarily be on it the next. This story will be on the Slashdot homepage today, and maybe tomorrow, but after that it'll be gone from there.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
First I cannot believe the author is advocating bloaty, useless things like side-bars?
Sidebars are useless- why would you need to see a list of links permanently in the window you are browsing? The so-called theory this is based on is merely a bunch of assumptions that all lead to one simple solution... If you want to build a theory on navigation- go take some cognitive psychology courses, and do some real studies.
Research & Annotations... How much more unnecessary can things get? Why not just create a bookmark folder and save the website, or if you are using OS X create a PDF of the page. I personally do not want to be switching constanly between my web-browser/organizer and a text editor while I'm writing an essay.
RSS as an over-rated concept? I don't think so.
This essay is just flat out wrong. You cannot improve the user experience of the WWW by adding stupid features like side-bars and research tools-- RSS may not be innovative alone, but how browsers and search engines are using RSS is innovative-- Safari RSS, and Firefox Live bookmarks are time-saving, useful features.
The innovation will now come from the WWW itself. Google is a great attempt at centralizing information while making it easier to access, sites like Google and protocols like RSS will be the source of major usability innovations- not browsers.
I think it's time the author gets his head out of the '90s and looks at the browser as a simple conduit to information, and not a tool for organizing the web.
Geez, just look at his HTML. If you're afraid, let the Validator look at it for you: plain results (4.01 Transitional), forcing charset, forcing HTML 3.2.
What are standards good for, anyway? Just use your monopoly to push your nonstandard browser and do it your way.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I'm sure there are some good ideas but isn't listening to this guy like listening to the designers of the Pinto and Chevette? I'd much rather learn from the enablers of intrinsic goodness of Toyota than the politics and momentum and self absorbtion of GM/Microsoft players.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Wait until he/she is able to search the history.
No. His complaint is that bad pages crash the browser. If the browser receives a malformed page, it should be handled - how is up for debated - not crash. If the application crashes, that's a bug. Think of a compiler. If the compiler receives malformed code (syntactically incorrect), crashing is not an option.
The design decision is only involved with what you do once you recognize it's malformed.
How about a to-the-letter correct and complete implementation of HTML, XHTML, CSS, and ecma script, without the "we know better" attitude that plagues all of today's browser writers, who invent their own tags, count pixels different, and all the other nonsense. 1px should = 1px no matter what the browser.
l8,
AC
Somebody already did that. IE passed, no other browser did. Although I think the firefox people got working on the bugs it showed up pretty quickly, and the only reason IE passed was because MS has recently incorporated this testing into their standard setup.
Well, under firefox 1.0, I didn't get a crash.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Epiphany and some of the other Gecko based browsers have this as well.
Looks similar to a fork bomb... that algorithm would crash just about anything, in any language, on any platform, unless the OS steps in and stops a runaway process.
Got a meaningful example? I still see Firefox as being far more stable and usefull.
In browser design, how about forgetting the bells and whistles for awhile and actually have browsers that fully support web standards? A complete implementation of CSS2 would be wonderful, as would at least partial support of CSS3. As a web developer, having support for these standards would make my job much easier and the sites I create better able to support a broad spectrum of users, all with less code than I'm using now.
It's great that you can have a browser that allows searching of bookmarks or something like the Web Developer Toolbar (my favorite extension!) for Mozilla, but until user agents really support standards, websites will still be designed for specific browsers or use ugly hacks to achieve cross-browser usability.
Hmm, but it doesn't crash! After chugging a bunch of CPU, a window came up and announced that a script was causing problems and wanted to know if I wanted to abort the script. I don't recal IE ever doing that.
the author basically claims that if security and stability ever become major marketing points, then the whole market has failed to meet minimal standards.
Quite frankly, I'm amazed that anyone even remotely associated with Internet Explorer has the audacity to say something like that.
Your Safari bookmarks are searchable, but not importable without turning on the debug menu in the preferences file.
This still drives me nuts - an otherwise polished browser with what to me is a glaring issue. I thought I was investing in usability. Stupid.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Unfortunately the original author has stopped working on the project, but another user is picking up the development.
Old site
New site
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
...IE ex-developer...writes an essay on...web browser design
Ha!
Of course the web pages are stored locally. Not only are they stored locally, they are also _indexed_, which is what makes searches fast. Think Google - the same type of technology is behind Simpy.
Actually, Simpy uses Lucene [1], a search tool I know a little bit about. [2] (no, this is not a promo)
[1] http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene
[2] http://www.manning.com/hatcher2
Simpy
What happened to the old Unix way? Is it any hard to grep a bookmark file?
I don't feel like it...
Again, take a look at Simpy - URL below. It implements a lot of ideas that various people mentioned in this thread/post.
Finding similar people base don their bookmarks contents is one of those implemented features.
Simpy
I like the way Konqueror works. It doesn't use Adobe's crappy plugin at all; it just uses the KPDF rendering engine to show the PDF in the browser window. Works perfectly in the newer versions of KDE.
I wonder why Mozilla can't do something like this.
IE actually says something similiar, if you wait long enough..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
nice try but you sir are behind the times. simply use your web browser to visit empornium and the bittorrent client of your choice to download the content...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slogger_ 2004-11-2 4-a/
http://home.cwru.edu/~jcw10/slogger/help
Slogger is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. It can:
* create a complete log of your browsing history (thus the name: Slogger "browse logger")
* save a copy of each page you visit to your hard drive and/or to an archive provided by an online service
* create a customizable text file containing a history of pages you've visited
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
How about Bank of America? That a big enough web site for you? Requires IE. Maybe it's just the Fleet Bank subsection, dunno, don't have access to anything else.
ixnay on the muinropme ay.
Simple. Don't be working for Microsoft.
In this household we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Am I the only one that sees the need for a "Delete Last 15 minutes from History and Cache" feature?
I've wished for a long time that browsers would correct misspellings in top level domains. It would be great if I could hastily type "slashdot.rog" and it would figure out that I meant "slashdot.org".
Does not Firefox have a proper "continue from last time" function? At least one other browser has. Disasters happen, so why not prepare for them?
10-4
Not only can one search for the title of the bookmark, but also the content at the page the bookmarks points to. Bookmarks titles are often very misleading. People rarely spend the time required to give them a proper name. So if the search involved the bookmark name, and the content at that bookmark, it would result in more accurate results. Think of it as a mini-google on each computer.
William
You're wrong.
IE failed when a second run was made, and that discovered the most recent IFRAME vulnerability; the one that was publically discussed because it was discovered publically, and went unpatched by Microsoft for far too long, even while in the mean time a worm had been created using it, and major advertising banner sites such as FalkAG (the Register's) infected with it, turning quite a few machines into zombie trojans.
The bugs found in Firefox (Gecko) were fixed in the very next nightly, and before 1.0.
I know which I feel more secure with.
I was thinking last night that we're getting close to the point where we can run a browser *within* another browser window.
With some new technologies, like XMLHTTPRequest we have the ability to fetch any other URL from within a browser.. you could have forms that you type the URL into, and it fetches the pages from within your browser.
Useless? No way! Imagine logging into Google's web-based browser, and having your bookmarks appear at the top of the page -- inside the browser window, fully searchable by your personal Google. Even better your history would be accessible from within Google's browser as well. Imaging typing in a search string, but limiting the search result to just pages in your history or bookmarks -- you could find that page you visited 10 months ago, but forgot where it was.
Of course there are privacy issues with this, but technically it can be done with everything we have in place now.
"colaborative filtering"
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
WHAT??!!
I'll remember that today as I use the IE-based ActiveX & JS abomination that is the interface to my work - the one that crashes multiple times per day because I *click too fast*! Taking my bookable time, completed work, and ordered materials with it...
I'll also remember that as I reboot my laptop multiple times trying to get the thing to connect, though that's the fault of the IBM wireless software and not IE...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Good, I was hoping FOSS would win that one eventually.
And yes, reading Slashdot is much easier on a tabbed web browser, so IE loses. But at least IE appears to render all of Slashdot's web pages correctly the first time, without the need for kluges like hitting reload N times or trying to resize the text twice. Arrrgh!
I only had to hit reload once to get Mozilla to render this comment-posting page well enough to post this comment. Aaaargh!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I develop a browser app which works with a lot of DOM/CSS/JS/... I can kill Firefox 1.0, nightly builds too, withing a few seconds of browsing our app. Unfortunately I don't have the possibility to send you the code (it's ours). Secondly, I don't have time to make a separate test case for dev'ers. Thirdly, filing a bugreport for Firefox (the proper way, that is) is a pain.
I would like to send a bugreport, but it cannot cost me more than an hour. My boss will tell me to start doing my work.
nosig today
In the interest of expanding the amount of free software you run, I'll try to address a few of your gripes. In short, some of your substantive gripes are addressed with extensions. All of the extensions I've found are free software, so one could modify them to suit one's needs. I think Firefox could use better session saving functionality (it's possible to save a bookmark for a tab which takes one to the website's front page, not to the search one was in the middle of doing when Firefox crashed or when one had to quit the Firefox session).
Point #6 of this extension's feature set seems to address this concern ("When the last tab is closed with Ctrl+W pressed or with Close Tab command, the main Firefox window can be kept, the tab is only made blank (as if Close Tab button is clicked).").
I use Prefbar to do this, but I'm sure there are other extensions available to accomplish the same thing.
These gripes are far too vague to address and will probably be viewed as unreasonable to mimic without identifying precisely what functionality is worth duplicating or improving upon.
This seems picayune, but on Fedora Core 3, Firefox has Edit->Preferences. On issues like this, I favor consistency and both choices make sense to me, so I don't really care where the menu option is.
Digital Citizen
Very true. Once I jumped on the CSS design web standards bandwagon I got very strident about it for a while. Kind of like when your friend finds religion and its all they care about for a bit. It's much easier to push people towards better practices by showing how things like web standards helps them NOW, not by proclaiming righteous indignation since IE has a double float margin bug or some other goofiness. I usually take the pro-search engine compatibility approach, as that has become the mantra of so many web marketeers. Nevertheless, when i get to the coding part of a project, I DO spend the vast majority of my headache hours on IE compatibility issues. The frustration comes less in having to deal with IE6 as its pretty darn good and reliable, it's having to deal with the older versions which, through no fault of MSFT's own haven't gone away yet.
Anyway, if you read the article, I suspect you'll find it really, really, dull, largely a compendium of the astoundingly obvious.
I can't say I was expecting much though: why would you expect someone who worked on IE design to know anything much about browser UIs? As is typical of Microsoft blockbuster projects, IE was a knock-off of something else, and whatever little improvements they may have made in the browser interface, they certainly weren't the reason that so many people adopted IE.
On the other hand, he does recommend reading Ted Nelson's "Literary Machines", so I can't be too hard on him. If you're interested in thinking about hypertext concepts forget about bickering about what little tweaks you want to see in Bookmark handling, and go read some Ted Nelson.
(But if you really want to talk about Bookmark handling ideas: the real trouble with searching your bookmarks for something is that Google will find it off of the net again faster, and if you're wrong and it's not in your bookmarks, you'll have to go googling anyway, so why not just start with google? So what I think you want is a generalized "Search" feature, that gives priority to hits from your bookmarks -- and perhaps your harddrive, eh? -- and then appends a list of google hits afterwards.)
Kudos to this submitter... He actually bothered to Coralize all the links!
"Second, any urls that are dead should be deleted, or moved to a folder of dead links that I can try to revive."
I'm liking the article but this rather stood out as something wrong (for me, ie my opinion, ie that which I think that you do not necessarily have to agree with but can if you so wish).
A browser that moved or deleted my bookmarks automatically (for its own dumb reasons) would get tossed pretty quickly.
Consider a duff link - is it totally useless? No, it represents something that: a) you might want to look for again; b) may well be available on http://www.archive.org/; c) may contain a relatively unique file name so that a search will instantly bring you its new address.
But, no, no you just go ahead and delete my bookmarks why don't you. *But* when I delete sodding Outlook express, hey, feel free to magically and silently bring *those* files back!!!
Even if bookmarks were resorted into a 'duff links' folder rather being dumped entirely you'd loose any filing information that you'd made for that link and let's face it, if you can't find a bookmark quicker than you can re-google for the site itself then there wasn't much point in making it, keeping it, or sorting it in the first place.
A bit more respect for users would be nice - this article reeks of 'users don't know jack': Apparently we need help even *generating* our own bookmarks (ie from our history) and we're not even trusted to set our home page correctly!!
Personally, on a Windows machine I just create short-cuts to web pages and sort and search them - I almost never go near the 'Favorites' menu if I can help it. Heh, and this is me when I'm liking and article...
Sorry for the OT, but I wanted to thank the Slashdot crew for adding .nyud.net:8090 to the end of *every* domain linked in this article. :)
Shouldn't the article be written by someone like Rob Davis to be taken even half seriously?
He says that the number one task that people use a web broser for is reading. Sure, it's obvious, but people seem to forget about it. In fact, he says this and then doesn't say anything about reading in the rest of his essay.
The biggest feature I want out of a web browser is that it not need horizontal scroll bars on any normal page regardless of the window size. It's okay if I'm looking at a large image or a large real table (think consumer reports) and I have clicked something to tell it that I want to look at the details.
When you cannot reach the page, instead of an irritating message box, put the error message in the tab title(so you can see it when it's a background tab), also, leave the address in the address bar so the user can try again.
Also, if user isn't connected to the internet, open the previously viewed page from the cache rather than just giving an error
And in your houshold I am sure that you can count precisely in micro-seconds exactly how long it DOES take to load.......just knock it off...kay?
I have created so many folders in Bookmarks to organize my URLs that the folders themselves overflow the space of my screen vertically. Firefox only lets me scroll through them (no PgUp/PgDown even!), and this is painfully slow.
Yes, search is there, but there must be a better way to visually/conceptually organize bookmarks.
Personally, it annoys the hell out of me that Firefox, IE, Opera, etc., have to even try to run this code before exitting. Why can't someone write a simple browser that can solve the halting problem, so we can be done with this?
Four buttons, a text field, and and large display area. The beauty is in the simplicity.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'd like to have the browser extract the ten most unusual words from the page I'm bookmarking and store them in a Google query URL.
Then if I navigate to the bookmark location and it 404's, the browser can make a stab at locating another copy of the same page elsewhere.
Here's a suggestion that you might find livable, and IIRC, iCab incorporates this into its bookmark engine...
:)
Institute a bookmark checker (like the WDG's Link Valet) and when a bookmark comes back 404, flip a metadata status flag to "broken," and notify the user. Make it extra-smart and have it follow auto-redirects and set a metadata flag to "redirected" and fill in a field "redirected URL" and then prompt the user to set this URL as a new URL for that bookmark.
As I said, iCab does the former (at least somewhat), though the latter half is wishful thinking right now.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Yes--on broken code. This has been discussed here before.
gewg_
Firefox 1.0 doesn't crash, i opened the site, rejected the java warning...
Firefox warned me that it had prevented the site from installing software on my machine (nasty) and the site tried to set a bunch of cookies. I clicked on several links and nothing, is there a particular link i should use?
As for sites which dont render in mozilla, theres plenty which don't render in ie either.. The difference is, 99% of the sites which fail in firefox do so because they use nonstandard tags and such, there are many which dont render in ie but do so perfectly in mozilla, safari, opera and others.. but this is usually because ie is horribly obsolete having not been updated for 2 years, and has horribly inadequate support for png, css and other things.
The difference is, these standards (png, css etc) are well documented and could easily be implemented by microsoft if they wanted, the non standard extensions that don't work in mozilla need to be reverse engineered which is time consuming and legally difficult.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'd like to see a way out of this:
for(i=0; i<1000; i++) alert(i);
Now I don't go to sites with millions of alerts but I do use alerts to debug sometimes. One mistake by me and some loops go on forever. Some way out of the loop without crashing Firefox would be good.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Actually no, I'm just smart....
If you had bothered to follow news, you would have known that bittorrent is the next thing that will fall as napster, kaza etc did. In fact, it has already started. I prefer to use USENET, higher speeds, no uploads, served me faithfully since the late 80's...
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I think it's great, keeps all my bookmarks synced (at home and work), and when I'm not at my PC, I have access to them from anywhere.
T.
I get fantastic speed with bt with no problems with completion (any more) :) and if the servers do start getting nailed then it will end up moving to a truly peer to peer architecture in some work based on it. Granted if you pay for usenet you can get a fairly good experience, but as people continue to use bt, and more people join, it gets faster whereas usenet costs more to support well as usage goes up, and for more reasons than bandwidth. This is why most ISPs (including mine, finally) have switched to outsourcing USENET, and you get little transfer. I pay quite a bit for internet access already...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or are you a idiot?
He was saying TeeVee as in a weirdly spelt trademarked propietry alternative to the standard TV.
Seeing as Slashdot mainly aims for a American audience I s'pose he should've spelt things out by putting a "®" symbol after TeeVee (of course without the quotation fields)
OK let sites have their own tailored look for menus but also allow sites to provide a .menu file that is downloaded like a css file. A simple XML file that contains the menus and submenus and associated URL and have the browser use this file to create a menu structure for that site. Sites that put up popup style windows such as outpost.com and they are difficult to navigate. Just don't feel like the system level menus and are slow to navigate.
Browsers that support it and see it in the header tag can deal with it so it can be adopted over time.
The site would feel more responsive and quicker to navigate. It could be placed just below the tab bar.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info.php/sess ionsaver
Sounds like something you need. That and ieview (right click to open in IE when Mozilla/Firefox won't cut it) or useragent (pretends to be IE by sending a selectable user-agent (that's browser name to us mortals) to your web sites and you're fine!
Cheers,
~gildas
I still have a major problem with firefox (that's otherwise excellent):
It's still not letting me use my $EDITOR to edit these goddamn textareas!!
Am I the only one who hates these clumsy textarea input widgets
we have to deal with every day? They're a pain for anything more than hacking up a couple lines of text.
The tab-key doesn't work, linewrap can't be turned off, copy/paste is "sometimes" flakey, the entered text cannot easily be saved elsewhere (without copy/paste), even basic formatting is hard (due to enforced linewrap and missing tab), spellchecking does not exist (maybe in opera?), focus can get screwed up and hitting enter might then submit whatever you scribbled up so far, etc. etc.
It's ok for slashdot but when you work alot with wikis (I do) you learn to love links which let's you use any editor for textareas. Unfornationally links is not good for everything so I find myself jumping back and forth...
I found a plugin for firefox (0.9 I think) awhile back that claimed it would allow to use a custom editor for textareas but, well, it didn't work.
Is this really too much asked (doesn't anyone else care about it?). I mean, having a little xterm with whatever editor embedded in the browser canvas would be the shit. But I'd already be happy if I could just launch it in an external window by clicking a button...
Sells for about $20 US.
You may think I am crazy but I actually paid for this browser, even with great alternatives like Firefox. The reason: it has the most amazing features, which after trying, made any other browser seem cumbersome. To name a few :
- Workspaces with auto-save (my favorite)
- Secure bookmark synchronization via webdav (indispensable)
- per-site preferences, (makes the web easy)
The catch : only for OSX.My ISP has a good and fast USENETserver, I always get max speed. Some groups have low retention, but I have an unlimited commercial USENET server for $14.95 a month. And quite frankly if I could not afford $15 a month extra, I could not afford to have a PC and a broadband connection anyway. Bitorrents are also based on you sharing by uploading in order to get speed, hence you are per definition a sharer. Continue to enjoy your filesharing, moving from one protocol to another in order to stay ahead of the 4 letter acronym orgs looking to get your cash.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!