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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)."
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
bookmarks, if they were searchable i think that would be a big improvement. i collect so many they get hard to manage.
Firefox has this.
I use Safari, and my bookmarks are searchable. Nice.
Bert
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.
So does Opera.
Help fight continental drift.
The search in Firefox isn't without it's problems. It doesn't just hilight the item in question, it hides all the other bookmarks and just shows you the one you wanted. Which isn't too useful when you're trying to find which folder it's in.
They should have definable filters like Thunderbird does for email.
about:cache in firefox.
Not terribly insightful or innovative? Coming from an ex-IE designer? Noooo. I don't believe it.
IE are the guys who think tabbed browsing isn't useful or desired by users. Is that why AOL is making an IE with tabbed browsing? Is that why every other browser has tabbed browsing? I think it's pretty obvious who's incorrect.
Taking hints from IE designers are like taking hints on car design from the designers of the Pinto. Sure, they might have gotten alot right, but there was that one problem...
Whenever you enter an username + password in Firefox, it asks if you want it to remember the password - the options are Yes, No, and Never for this site. I think what you want to do can be accomplished using Yes and Never for this site.
Of course, you can change these settings afterwards if you want to.
My website
Opera has searchable history and searchable cache
Firefox has a great plugin (Bookmarks Synchronizer 1.0.1) I use to save my bookmarks to my website; it uploads/downloads on exit/start so everything's current, but this takes a few seconds everytime you open or close the browser... a bit annoying, but very functional!
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
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
The Opera search does just exactly what you want it to do: it shows you all the bookmarks that match your search string but doesn't hide the folders that they're in. Time to upgrade.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Done for Firefox Here!
Bzzt, wrong.
If you search your bookmarks in Opera for "games" it doesn't just return the results that have games in the bookmark name (eg, Gamespot) but also any matches that have "games" in the URL (eg, www.somethingaboutgames.com), the site description/meta-tags (eg, "This website is devoted to games...", and any folders that you've created with "games" in the name (eg, "Mindgames").
In other words, it does exactly what you're describing.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Run xinerama my friend.
I would guess that you tried it in the past and were dissapointed with it. I have two (used to have three) screens xineramaed together into one desktop. It works out much nicer now. It also gives you a lot of room for cusomized toolbars, since you only have one app switcher and one applications menu.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Safari has that, too.
"Bookmarks" -> "Show All Bookmarks", select "History" on the left side, hit cmd-F.
You can't do a case-sensitive search, which is a minor drawback.
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.'"
Firefox, Opera and Safari all have this feature too.
Sidebars haven't been excluded from Firefox. You have the History bar and the Bookmarks bar, and you can also open any web page in the sidebar.
Sidebars are not for quick-launching a website; for that you have the bookmarks bar. They are used as goal-based navigating tools. Need to find a web you visited one week ago? Open the History bar, and find your way through it. Want to browse Google News daily? Open it as a sidebar, and click links for different news. That's why almost every web page in the Net has a sidebar on the left side.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I know, but Opera had that option forever, unlike Firefox, IIRC: Not that i'm bashing Firefox, but Opera's user interface has been consistently excellent since perhaps version 4.