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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?
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.
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
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.
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?.
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.
Help fight continental drift.
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.
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.
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
The one thing I'd like to see is a spelchkr and grammer checkar build right into the browser.
Wooden that be kool?
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...
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!
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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