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)."

Comments

Fuck W3C standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?