Slashdot Mirror
What Do You Want On Future Browsers?
Coach Wei writes "An industry wishlist for future browsers has been collected and developed by OpenAjax Alliance. Using wiki as an open collaboration tool, the feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. Currently, the top three voted features are:
2D Drawing/Vector Graphics, The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue, and HTML DOM Operation Performance In General . OpenAjax Alliance is calling for everyone to vote for his/her favorite features. The alliance also strongly encourages people to comment on the wiki pages for each of the existing features and to add any important new features that are not yet on the list."
On a related note, an anonymous reader writes "The Tao of Mac has put up pretty interesting list of five things that are still wrong with browsers these days, and I have to wonder — with things like AIR starting to be accepted by developers, do we still need the browser at all?"
Laserbeams....oh yeah...and Ninjas!!!
I upgraded firefox and now it decides to crash every 15 minutes, when it used to only crash every half our. So yeah, I'd just like a browser that lets me complete all my web tasks without dying on me.
open source modern art: laser taggi
All I want is sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads!
So browsers other than IE support (to varying degrees) referencing SVG drawings using the <img> or <object> tags. But that doesn't go far enough, IMHO; since both SVG and XHTML are both XML, I'd like to be able to embed either within the other, e.g. by putting a SVG polygon or circle on a webpage (surrounded by HTML), with another field of HTML embedded inside it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
More speed and less bloat.
Make it launch in 1 second and run for years without consuming much ram as well as render the page and all text FIRST before loading graphics and other crap.
I am tired of the bloated dead fish that browsers have become.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What do _I_ want? HTML and CSS compliance. That's it. Get that done first then worry about the 'features'.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Teledildonics. Mmm.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
and a decent h&j algorithm --- if only TBL had taken a closer look at TeXview.app on his NeXT Cube before writing worldwideweb.app
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I want some degree of protection from the entire browser crashing when a plugin misbehaves(***cough*** flash ***cough***)
Give me 3D vector graphics, and let me play Battlezone in the browser!
Flying car functionality...
I'd like a URL bar that searches, you know, URL's when I type them in instead of matching unrelated text that happens to be somewhere in the title of the pages I've visited.
Firefox 3 ought to be enough for everybody
First of all, I want them to fix the Slashdot effect so I can read about the other probems.....
Mod parent up.
I used up all of my mod points on that story about the shitty Model M knockoff keyboard.
I'd like an upload meter.
Not a bloated piece of garbage. That would be a good "feature".
I know what I want: an upload progress bar. We've had download progress bars for nearly two decades now, so why not the same for uploading? In this age of YouTube and such, users are uploading files in their browsers more often than ever before, and the addition of an upload progress bar in the browser (not implemented as a hackish AJAX/Flash application) would be very much appreciated.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Whew that was a easy question. ; )
I do enjoy a minimum browsing quality. However, personally, all of the competing browsers currently on the market do what I ask them to. Yes, this includes IE7. Microsoft has vastly improved their browser and I applaud them for it. However, I think there's a point where feature packing has its limit. I guess you could compare it to Microsoft adding tons of bloat to XP and making Vista instead of fixing the outstanding issues of XP. I believe there's a point where browsers are just fine, and extra features would be superfluous. I thought Firefox 2 had attained that point until Firefox 3 came out, with its many performance improvements. At this point I only think that bug fixes and even more performance improvements are necessary. Vector graphics? No thanks. My work computer already has enough trouble loading Toms hardware and slashdot properly as it is.
'Nuff Said.
Seriously though how about some decent security for a change. It would be nice to have a browser that doesn't let malware pown you system with a million vulnerabilities or so. Integrate an adware/spyware protection system.
That and boobies.
and tabs, and decent memory management. Speed is good also. Sharks with frikin' lasers...
and not just one single file when I want to upload. I really hate to go that java/activex way to solve this issue today.
Although the Adblock plugin works wonderfully in Mozilla, I'd like to see more features in it. Wonder if there is something similar in IE? It'd be great if Mozilla would take charge of the development of that plugin and start to release it with Firefox instead of an add-on.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Until AIR is open source or the open source community releases an AIR-compatible runtime, we will always need a browser. Even then, we will probably still need it for the developers who believe that AIR development is terrible on anything but Windows.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Using the HTML 5.0 Video tag in SVG to implement a Silverlight style demo in Firefox 3:
http://www.zappinternet.com/video/FuVbJidVax/SVG-Video-Demo
A feature that detects duplicate stories on Slashdot so you don't waste your time reading them only to realize it's a dupe. That'd rock.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
browser based rich-text editing is a huge mess. of the browsers that claim to support it, there's very few functions that work universally, and everything else has to be hacked together. one of the 4 major browsers, up until the latest version, couldnt even create hyperlinks!
we need a standard desperately, and we needed it years ago.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
Maybe we should be thinking what do we want _beyond_ a web browser?
Gotta get me one of these!
I don't want it to read my email, or be my RSS reader. I don't want it to be an image editor, or a word processor, or MP3 player or media library. I would like it to be standards compliant, render web pages quickly, not consume loads of ram, and be stable. If I want any of the various 'features' as above, I'll take them in a plugin-format, or through a web application programmed to standards that can accomplish that task. Or, use a stand alone program for it. I want my applications to specialize in a few things and do them VERY well, I dont want 'jack of all trades, master of none' applications that implement dozens of features (most I dont want/use anyways), that don't do them very well, and add to overall bloat/instability in the application.
I'd like a proper sleep() function in JavaScript .
How about some customizable on/off toggles, or dials for stuff like Javascript, cookies, etc. Hace it so that you can put it on the browser surface - like right next to the printer icon. Easily accessible, and not down 4 layers of menus.
Some tabs I don't mind cookies/java, and some tabs I don't want it. I need cookies when on ebay, but then don't want them when I click to some link on a foreign newspaper article. Or don't want java on when visiting pron sites, etc.
Maybe have a site "paranaoia" slider for security, or a "wife" button to erase all recent cookies from that particular tab ;-)
Other than that, FF is pretty perfect just as it is, with the exception of fixing crashes.
..........FULL STOP.
I think that you have to make the design modular so the ninjas can be made available either with or without laser beams. While we're at it, we will really need an open standard bus supporting ninja-laser interconnectivity. I should think that we could interest an IEEE working group in such an activity. It's important that we develop a generic enough command set so that our ninjas and lasers can interact with as rich a set of other devices as possible. (i.e. ninja-laser-television-beer cooler interoperability would be high on my list)
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful
Better cookie handling
I would like firefox to have a "kill the sound" button like IE does. If I'm on a site that plays background music, I can press [esc] in Internet Explorer and get silence. In Firefox, I don't think there is such a keystroke.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Kill 10% of the performance but bounds check everything.
I use "noscript" and flashblocker and I havn't gotten anything yet. but a friend using firefox was trashed by a link a friend sent her. A lot of "legit" sites (esp lyrics) now inject stuff into your computer.
I want safety first, then after that ,, safety. THEN maybe some new feature.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Browsers should be able to automatically detect if the server the user requested is overloaded and, if so, automatically try to fetch a copy from other users.
This would end slashdotting once and for all.
IMO the most important things for browsers in the near future is the following:
If all this could be done then I'd be pretty happy with the state of web browsers and would stop complaining...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
People are looking for 14 different flavors of HTML, different scripting languages, plug ins, sandboxes and more and they somehow want all of this slop to throw in graphics ...
maybe, just maybe, the idea of a single application that accesses all information is a dumb idea, and the right place for this sort of integration is on the desktop, after all.
This is my sig.
...are things like declarative animation so that well produced sites continue to degrade gracefully when the whopping security hole known as javascript is disabled. I know the ajax alliance aren't the best group to discuss that one with but some of the items on the list are odd. CSS gradients and blur have been implemented in WebKit but the work on CSS animation is far more important. Why wouldn't they just ask for SVG in IE instead of lumping it with canvas support?
For other stuff like coroutines in javascript, Brendan's already talked about that extensively.
Unimpressed.
Right there.
TFA is already slashdotted.
Things I'd like to see:
Probably other stuff. I plan on visiting TFA tonight, at a quieter time, when they maybe have recovered from the meltdown.
NoScript is nice, but isn't selective enough. I'd like to be able to
* allow scripts to manipulate document elements only (no submitting form data, downloading data, manipulating windows, etc.)
* allow scripts to manipulate document elements and download content from the originating site only (i.e., a script from foo.com could download content from foo.com but not from bar.com)
* allow scripts to maniuplate document elements, download content from and upload content to the originating site only
* allow scripts to do anything (not reccomended)
When running in one of these modes, any attempt by a script to do something else should silently fail.
Unfortunately, the current state of affairs seems to be to allow scripts to do anything by default, while third-party plugins/extensions can be used to block scripts altogether or to restrict a handful of actions (opening windows, resizing windows, etc.). This is not adequate.
Push. Of course, 99.99% of Slashdotters don't have any idea of this concept.
when I first heard of bittorrent, I always thought it would make an excellent addition to the http protocol to utilize bittorrent or something like it to share the content of a page, including embeded images and other media content, for as long as a browser window is open on that page, with the web site itself acting as an initial seed if nobody else is currently viewing the page. Instead of the data transfer load being placed entirely on the web server, the task could be delegated to other machines that are viewing that page, all of which ought to have the information readily available. This would have the upshot of keeping smaller websites from being crippled due to sudden surges in traffic, such as what is all too often caused by news stories on sites such as slashdot and numerous others on the web. Had things gone this way back in the day, I think I can safely say we would not be seeing P2P throttling happening the way it is today, because it would be too prevalently used by the mainstream population for general purpose browsing for the ISP's to pull it off without legitimate complaint from everyday users.
I have to say I'd still like to see something like that... although I suspect now it may be too late, because broadband ISP's are already throttling protocols like bittorrent, so most of its potential benefit may already be gone.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
better sound control. Or better yet, video capability.
Then I can finally play videos in the browser AND interact with them...
I would like to remove flash as soon as possible....
Something that would filter out crap sites like experts-exchange.com and others that require you to sign in to see the content. Also filter sites that do fast redirects so you can't use the back button.
Yes I can already hear a collective grown from Slashdot purest about the idea. But lets face it, web pages are going to get more and more application like and less page like, and I doubt there is nothing you can do to stop it. Now as developers we either will need to keep hacking and making more and more tricks to the existing HTML and CSS to get it to display correctly or bite the bullet and create optimized features that will make Web Browsers a good source for application development.
1. Standardized Vector Graphics. Why download graphics to display a line graph where if all browsers had vector graphics SVG or whatever just as long it was standardized For some cases having XY cordanates will save on bandwidth and server load time.
2. Secure Bytecode Javascript. Open Source is all good and great however not all developers are keen on how the Web Interface works, sometimes putting to much of the security checking in JavaScript. Having Javascript in an encrypted bytecode format where you are not just a view source away for finding a backdoor. Yes you can say people who make these mistakes are stupid and get what they deserve however, it doesn't fix the problem, and the stupid person who codded the page could be working for your bank, with his code between the internet and your money.
3. Better Debugging: Firefox is OK. IE with Visual Studio's When it works (a big When) is OK. But I would love to be able to debug JavaScript and HTML put a break on an HTML, or change the CSS after it loaded try different variants until I get it right.
4. HTML element to have a Visible property.
5. Easier way to use the ID name vs. GetElementbyId.
Yes I know I will get a bunch of Hate messages and A lot of my requests require new HTML/Javascript Standards first or they are already there and nobody has implemented them, or Just hate using HTML for applications. However I see HTML as the new VT100 used as a standard for displaying information from my application. Not just a text formatting option.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sockets. Raw sockets. Stop pretending with AJAX, with Comet, and just cut to the chase. Why this isn't the first thing on the AJAX agenda beats me.
You want to run Firefox on Vista. ... the two (three) things that make Vista useful are
OK, I hate Vista but
1) Separate sound control per application. Firefox stays muted 99% of the time. While iTunes gets to play.
2) Better offline files (Business or Ultimate). Finally this just works
3) Vista Media Center. Not the best but useful.
As for the rest of Vista I see nothing but eye candy and "Not Responding" errors.
Privilege separation... plain and simple. That's it.
The fact that a JPEG, WMF, TIFF, PNG, Flash, Javascript or whatever bug can take down the whole browser or exploit some bug to execute arbitrary code with your user's privilege level is a sick joke from ever browser author.
What else matters?
I'm not sure how specifically this might work, but people are going to need a way to deal with the new TLDs; with lots of new suffixes, you won't be able to just remember one word and add a ".com" after it like today.
So we're going to need some kind of URL "order check," so that anybody who types in ipod.apple instead of apple.ipod (or whatever the appropriate URL ends up being) will quickly and clearly be corrected and then automatically forwarded to the most appropriate website (the legal issues surrounding a particular URL's "correctness" for a search will of course will have to be fleshed out in the design and subsequent lawyer battles, and it could even turn out to be a very powerful thing to control).
I want a browser that:
1) Does not hang for a good minute if I happen to type in an invalid address.
2) Does not crash if I happen to click on a non-standard page.
3) Does not require me to download some java/flash/newfangled invention in order to access content.
4) Never gives me a technical server error in some language I don't understand (and yes, I realize it's the server).
5) Does not allow a malicious web page to open an infinite number of new pages.
The rest of that junk? I mean who really cares if it slices and dices -- all I want is to be able to browse in comfort.
I just want a browser that doesn't bother me.
I don't want to click through a screen about updates. I want to manually click a button requesting updates. I don't want the field I'm typing in to lose focus when "something else happens." Ignore it. I am more important. I don't want to have to worry about my plugins playing nice with my browser. Some sort of official "we know these don't break" repository of plugins would be nice.
Also. Don't wait for images to load to show me text.
A browser that overwrites its own cache file using some semi-resistant algorithm would be nice. Just so that you don't have to run eraser whenever a link gets you somewhere you didn't want to be.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
does that, and also allows me to run Flash 32 bits in a 64 bits Firefox.
See: HTML 5.
It will be implemented by all major browsers (yes this includes IE; with the help of a compatibility library, if necessary).
Built in support (i.e. enabled by default for millions of users) for OpenPGP trust model for SSL certs. Kill the CA oligarchy by giving them serious competition, where an identity can be certed by any number of CAs, partially trusted through a WoT, etc.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, Firefox comes with several things as default that could have been add-ons.
Parental controls, RSS feed reader, zoom, search pane, bookmark manager, spill chucker, and a whole lot more that not everyone will want to use. More and more features seem to creep in with every new version.
Unfortunately the article doesn't touch on the upcoming Google browser. It is in the works and based on Webkit and a big secret. I know nobody will believe me, but I have real sources, so you heard it here first.
Since you asked, I'd like the browser to become the operating system. Then any hardware that could run the browser could run everything else.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
$ telnet www.google.com 80
nuff said.
My blog
Browsers need a mechanism for connecting two clients' browsers without going through an server. This would greatly ease chat clients and possibly even browser based file-sharing applications. This feature requires the same sort of access controls that would make cross-site scripting secure. Such policies would make it a lot easier to make mash-ups that access remote machines directly instead of through an arbiter. Eliminating the one-client-one-server communication bottleneck currently built-in to JavaScript would decrease the network traffic generated by some applications by more than 50%.
So much of AJAX is making a polling protocol (HTTP) look like a push protocol. What really needs to happen is that browsers and the "web" need to adopt a push protocol like XMPP Publish-Subscribe http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html to augment HTTP.
The better question is, What don't you want on future browsers?
I guess it's time to dig out the wishlist I made for OpenScape/Mnemonic back in the day. Most of the features still haven't been implemented in any browser.
Cheese and pepperoni.
Oh wait, wrong question.
A browser that uses its cache, regardless of no-cache directives from the web page. If I've navigated to a page, and want to go back to it, I certainly don't want to reload it because 1 comment out of 20 has possibly changed. That's what reload is for! I also don't want to have to re-POST to get there either. Chances are, when I mean to go back to the result of a POST'ed page, I want to look at the results. I don't want to have to re-POST to get those results, an operation which is probably not idempotent.
Right now browsers are limited to linear forward and back. Branching would be nice to see graphically too. Then maybe I wouldn't need so many darn tabs open.
... for someone other than the "Ajax development community" to be driving this.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
Please don't ignore printing! Lack of strong page layout control limits how capable web applications can become. Pagination and good control over printing will make web based office automation applications much more attractive. All we have now is a barely working page-break-before-always css capability. We need the ability to control whether spans are kept together on the same page, control over H&J, page numbering and the linking of div boxes to allow overflow to flow from one box to another.
Greed is the root of all evil.
The user must be in charge. Not the remote site. Not any "toolbars". Specifically,
You get the idea. When it's user vs. website or user vs. toolbar, the user wins.
I need (read = want) flash for movies, but sometimes I just want to block certain flash adds (especially the flashing ones) when I am reading text.
Here be signatures
Since the website is slashdotted, I'll add my 2-cents here:
The top feature I'd like to see is a powerful editable data grid (think spreadsheets) and tree widget. Ideally it would be potentially both a tree and grid mixed together like some of the more powerful grid/tree widgets on the market. But I'd be fairly happy with separate ones also.
The ability to nest other widget types in the grid/tree, such as check-boxes, drop-down lists, and buttons, is also nice.
Table-ized A.I.
Standards, a test suite to prove compliance with those standards and a way to force everyone to adhere to those standards.
I should be able to change the background color to pink and replace all images on the page with ponies and rainbows.
Multiplayer support.
How about a working browser cache??
Pull up a reasonably complex web page (e.g. NYTimes). Click on a link. Now hit the "Back" button. What takes so *ing long to repaint the previous screen that was displayed less than five seconds ago and so is (hopefully!) still in the browser's cache?? I can frag alien life forms at 72 Hz, but a simple browser page repaint takes a visibly long time?
And - do not under any circumstances pop up a new friggin' window unless I ask for it.
A strongly typed scripting language for the browser would go a long way to making life easier.
How about:
* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
* Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Seems like you'll eventually get all the others if you have these.
Security and standardization.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Rather than just adding more features, simplify stuff.
Make Javascript faster and add a JIT and optional type declarations (in progress).
Standardize local storage.
Most ajax developers (NOT USING SOME FANCY/LIMITING FRAMEWORK) will run into basic synchronization problems that will cause major problems. Basic critical sections and thread safety primitives are needed. The closest I've found is an implementation of the bakery algorithm. Many of these issues can be solved with synchronous ajax calls, but for true asynchronisity, you'll need these primitives.
It would save a lot of time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Consistency.
This applies to "Future Browsers" as a group. Get together and make rendering and APIs consistent. Please. I really don't even care if you follow the W3 "standard" (which is certainly far from optimal). Just make it all consistent, guys. Make it so I can learn the rendering model and APIs and be done with it, instead of banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why browser X has a different behavior than browser Y and which one is correct and what I should do about it.
I want a web browser that will magically still display something legible on those javascript and flash heavy pages, with that stuff turned off. Is it too much to ask some sort of links that function without javascript?
The #1 thing I want out of Firefox is threading.
Even IE has a separate thread for flash objects or other tabs.
It turns the FF browsing experience into one that is usually slower than IE and infinitely more frustrating when the browser is too busy rendering stuff in the background to listen to the user trying to use it.
Question everything
Not really. I would like a way for to know when non RSS sites are updated. One that actually works and alerts me via a dialog. Auto file saving! I download files to update devices around the house and it would be nice if when a new version of a watched file was released it would auto download and then let me know it was done. Macros would be nice as well.
So basically, what people want in a browser is native app capabilities and performance.
I KNOW, I KNOW! (shakes hand in the air)
Let's replace HTML with executable files, so any web site can do anything ever imagined. Yay!
Seriously people, HTML ain't perfect, but this whole Ajax mess is a whole lot more functionality than the web ever needed. More features = more trouble, just like biggie used to say.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Generally I like to allow those things as the enrich my browsing experience, but when the advertisers think it's fun to position their floating add right over the text of an article, or to incorporate repeating background music or sound effects, or when the off-site banner takes a minute to load, it really bothers me. Typical pop-up blockers don't seem to catch a lot of the in-page elements and sometimes block pages that I want to show up. I wish there was a "force close" right-click command for page elements like there is for Linux programs.
A mode you can set and keep in preferences to minimize the amount of real-estate the controls take, for small screens like on sub-sub-notebooks. Ideally there would be nothing showing except a small row of buttons on the title bar for most used gestures like "back" and "home". Give me an option to get rid of all that cute real-estate-chewing crap at the top of the browser.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Safari recently implemented transformations on elements using CSS (-webkit-transfom), which allows you to rotate and scale block element on screen. I used this in my WordPress theme and it looks very cool, but of course it only works in Safari. I wish other browsers would work to support it, it really has a lot of uses.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
Safari used to be this browser, then they did something to the back-end, and pressing "stop" while it's loading will do nothing except make the slow page reload YET AGAIN once it's finished the Batan death-march you were trying to stop in the first place.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Just didn't see one in the extensions list in a search for 'history' before it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2965
Unfortunately, it's only for older FireFox versions and 'experimental' at that.
Similarly (also not maintained), Referrer History:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1756
ForwardFork is also similar, and also similarly dead.
Makes you think if there's a reason; one post (in Referrer History) notes that as javascript, it's just too slow, and would have to be added in the core. If it's not in FF3 yet (I'm still on v2), then I guess they didn't see fit to do so.
Academics have little impact on the future. Powerful companies and the young charismatics shape the future. Given that, I think Google Gears plugin will become one of the great new features.
Why would you want a 2d graphics rendering engine when you could have GL? Browsers can offload processes to video cards and make the whole thing run a hell of a lot faster.
I consider myself a simple man, with modest wishes. As far as my browser needs go, Firefox 3 pretty much fulfills them.
However, things can always get better, so in the future I would like all browsers to render (X)HTML documents correctly (ie as per the W3C specifications) and identically. If the W3C are unclear on anything, they should settle the uncertainty, and fill in any gaps they may have left.
Also, it would be nice to be able to use some of the newer techniques 'out there', like SVG. Firefox seems to do this nicely, but Konqueror does not. I don't think IE in any version does it. For a nice page that uses SVG for good purposes try http://isthis4real.com/orbit.xml.
And since I am making wishes for the future, wouldn't it be nice to be able to use any of the techniques the W3C (or other relevant body) accept as recommendations/standards? Like a multitude of image formats, various mark-up languages (MathML springs to mind) and fully supported CSS/JavaSCript/Java.
Everyone wants a faster and more stable web browser. However, standards on the internet are diverging. The future browser will be expected to handle more plugins than it does now. Right now we have Flash and Java. Soon we will have Silverlight/Moonlight. Who knows what will come next.
In order for the browser to be the best it can be, we need to reduce the usage of proprietary protocols on the internet. We need the internet to be straightforward and open. I don't foresee this happening in the near future, and I therefore wish you good luck.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
How about being able to clear my browser history. I used Firefox 3.0 for about one hour before deciding to downgrade back to 2.x after I found out that you can't clear your browser history in 3.0
If you have 15 simultaneous downloads, and need the bandwidth for other things, it would be neat with a "Pause/unpause all downloads" button in the download window.
The option today is to pause each and every one manually.
Or more thorough UI customization - even for the little things. Maybe a "customize this" click feature
For instance, in firefox 3 I would like to remove:
- Site icon / drag point. It is nice, but I rarely use it for dragging the URL to another application.
- XML feed thing in the address bar. Never used it.
- bookmark this page icon. There is a fine menu item for that, and I can live with that if I get more space in the address bar.
- The spyglass icon in the search box. I know what the box is for and [enter] works fine.
I would also like to make the bookmark management menu items in the bookmark menu a sub-menu. FF3 added two menu items and now I have to live with the scrolling menu.
I would also like to make the browser load plugins in a separate process. I seems that plugin initialization locks the browswer. This is not ideal when clicking on a 20MB PDF file and having to wait for it to download while I could be browsing something else.
Just a thought, but I'd like an option to open a link with browser history turned off. Just right-clicking on a link and selection "Open in new tab with history turned off" and after that everything that is done in that particular tab is not recorded in _anywhere_.
This was actually my friends request, he needs that.
Soon pls? Really getting sick of flash crashing on me all the time. Would also be nice to see major websites like youtube embrace this.
Any day now an article will show up on http://dev.opera.com that shows how to use SVG on any page you visit. Only works on Opera 9.5
Other browsers also do at least some mixing.
A way to turn off the friggin' "Awesome Bar" in Firefox 3!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I know this is boring, but rather than any new ad-ons, I'd like to firefox to be as fast or at least almost as fast as IE. Then I'd have a PRAYER of getting IE replaced with Mozilla, in the companies where I work. That would lead to replacing the Windows machines with Linux, and that would make me a happy person.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352367
No, I'm not making this up to make Mozilla look bad. No, I'm not wrong. This is a killer in corporate America. Companies with big sloppy apps with laundry lists of data cannot use Mozilla. They're stuck with IE.
Speed up rendering for large tables. By a factor of ten or so.
then it should provide the features of one. Task management, niceness levels, ability to suspend tabs, etc. It really freaked me out how much CPU firefox could eat up while all the tabs are minimized! FF3 seems a lot better, thanks. It wasn't animated GIFs, either. But it might have been flash. When something is going to consume as much resources as web browsers are starting to, it makes sense to have a means to query and manage the resources.
Oh, and cue the emacs/operating system jokes.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Whatever happened to that idea? In theory the browser dowload speed and render times would be faster.
Like many poster I'd want a fast and stable browser first but, realizing that the browser is inevitably going to become the dominant application platform of the future I'd want all sorts of controls to make sure it works in pro of users and not against them, some ideas:
* A tray/notification area button allowing fast access to kill/ban disruptive applications.
* A sort of history that allows one to review how many connections and data have been used by an application.
* Controlled resources to each application so that one heavy application doesn't slow down the others, just itself, and a way to prioritize how much resources can be consumed by a given application, and make this setting persistent of course.
But... the future refused to change.
Awfulbar is an abomination. It's a security risk. It has the potential to cause embarassment (and no, not just if you browse porn) and it's ugly and clunkly. The only reason I'm using Firefox 3 is that I found the oldbar + hide unvisited extensions which get rid of that turd of an address bar.
I want browser developers to stop foisting awful design on us, breaking existing functionality that works well, and then refusing to listen to people's concerns while ploughing ahead with their own agenda even if it makes no sense to anyone but them.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Performance performance performance performance, performance performance performance performance, p...
Essentially, I want my quad core machine, with 4gb of ram, 18mbit DSL medium latency line (minimum 80ms being ADSL) to feel like the hardware it is.
I want each tab to be running in a different process, so when one tab calls a a nasty plugin which locks the browser for 30 seconds, it's still usable.
Much like this post I made only days ago.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=594055&cid=23926639
With that in mind, I think if Safari, Opera and Firefox (hell and IE too if they wanted to play ball) could start to push for some sort of mechanisms to standardize on pulling executable content out from being comingled with the (x)HTML and then possibly provide some sort of mechanism for providing an alternative to Javascript for it. I think javascript is fine for some things, but as more and more of these full featured AJAX effects libraries and the like take over something we might be able to get a little more performance out of would be nice. I'm also still of the belief that there are tons and tons of Javascript based security problems. It's kind of the lowest common denominator right now but if the better browsers supported an alternative it could start to take hold.
Why bother making more browser enhancements when we could just embed emacs instead?
Also, I want a bookmarking system with some smarts, i.e. that can categorize bookmarks itself. And of course I want to be able to search that, including any tags that I might have attached to a page. Think of del.icio.us, but without the privacy horrors.
After all, we often take a very strange path from one place to another on the Web, and the challenge of properly categorizing bookmarks makes it easy to skip doing it at all, especially since it's hard to sometimes remember where you put a bookmark.
New features are not what make people move, excepting those that come from plugins. People don't use ie6 because they like using an unsafe, uncompliant program. They're using it because MS stripped the menu bar out of the default configuration, and crippled it when you tried to re-enable it.
All we want is those things. Also, new, better standards. SVG does come to mind, though if it was fully implemented I'd probably be blocking it like flash.
Best just to leave it at CSS3 and XHTML that eliminate the use of Javascript as much as possible.
I want a full implementation of HTCPCP
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Absolutely, can't-get-there-from-here, won't-open-a-page-on-a-tab-if-your-life-depends-on-it.
I hate stinkin' tabs-- on Windows they're redundant. Don't want 'em, don't need 'em, they annoy the hell out of me, get 'em outta here NOW!
FYI-- I use Firefox, and generally like it, but the Tabs option of "New Pages Should be Opened In" does not always work-- now and then a tab opening seems to sneak in. If anyone knows the HTML that does that, I'll screen it in my proxy filter, currently by the time I spot a tab that got opened it's pages later when I try to close and it "warns" me that there's a tab open that I didn't notice. By then whatever did it came and gone, drive-by tab openings, BAH!
-- Curmudgeon
Add some correct SEO and accessibility support to Flex and you got everything we need.
Really.
We're just trying to reinvent what Flash can do for a while.
{{.sig}}
- User-configurable CPU throttling for embedded javascript, flash, animations etc
- Completely non-blocking UI. The hourglass should *never* appear.
- Automatic classification of bookmarks
- Browsable history with a tractable user interface--searchable history, automatic page classification, faceted search over history and bookmarks
- History of form entries and autosave for any user generated text, bookmarks to partially filled-in forms
That's too bare bones. I use a fancy version:
wget -O - http://www.google.com/ | less
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'd like to be able to read pdf files confortably directly in the browser. The current plugins really suck for on-screen reading. There must be a way to present pdf files so it feel more like reading a regular web page. The document should render directly in the browser, with no waiting for a plugin to load, and no extra button-bar. Fonts should be screen friendly. The pages should be scaled automatically so that they are easy to read. Pages should be pre-rendered into memory so that scrolling is fast.
Is it just me, or are all the wiki pages missing?
I want full multiple-document interface, like in opera. I can't believe that isn't already available in the big browsers.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I believe the add-on you want is Nuke Anything Enhanced. It provides a "Remove This Object" entry in the right-click menu.
To get rid of Java / Flash you can select across the object and use "Remove Selection".
Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
Basically, all of the suggestions offerered here and in TFA are things that a browser was never meant to do. HTTP does an extremely good job at what it is designed to do: deliver HTML pages with text and images. Every feature since that people have manged to add since then has been hack upon hack. CGI and PHP were clever indeed, but can only be taken so far in terms of application complexity. Trying to turning the web into an applications platform is almost as ridiculous as trying to turn email into a feature-rich VoIP conferencing solution. Only nobody sees this because the former almost works for a few limited purposes.
But these days, everyone wants the web to do everything. A noble goal, for sure, but not a very realistic one. Writing a full-feature web app is outright painful. The presentation layer is inflexible, the protocols are stateless, the security by and large sucks, and you have to learn a minimum of 5 different languages for the average web app: a general-purpose language, a markup language, a stylesheet language, a database language, and a client-side scripting language. On top of that, browser vendors still can't agree on which subsets of the standards to support.
We don't need new hacks bolted onto the web, we need something that will make the web obsolete as an application environment. I'm not saying chuck the WWW out the window, but design an application environment to complement it. New protocols, new presentation methods, a good security layer, and modular storage components. If done correctly, you should be able to either visit a website and use an application there or download it to your desktop and use it offline. It should be able to degrade gracefully, like HTML does, when devices or clients are unable to support all features (like a mobile web browser or voice-driven browsers for the blind).
It should be noted that there have been attempts at technologies similar to this. Java promised exactly this, and maybe was a bit ahead of its time, but its drawbacks (performance and complexity, among others) outweighed its benefits for the hobbyist coder. XUL might have also been a good start, but failed to gain a critical mass of developers, even among its own designers.
Whoever invents this web application environment and makes it successful will be a millionaire. Now get to work, the future needs you!
Since the wiki is down at this stage, I thought I'd give my suggestions here:
1. Combining the current technologies available, I would really want to have dropdown selectable templates, so for example, I can have a template that just shows text, another - text and images, and another - text, images and links, so I can pretty much define how the page looks as I'm receiving it.
2. Priority Searches. Get the browser to display results primarily from a standard or customizable list of sources, then list everything else. For example: site:wikipedia "slashdot", site:oxford dictionary "slashdot", site slashdot: "slashdot" etc automagically.
3. Send link/page without opening up default email prog. Just read and display and address book or customizable address book.
4. Inbuilt desktop search.
That would be great!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I really hate when I CTRL-Click a bunch of links, and suddenly there is a hodgepodge of unintelligible sound as the Flash ads and/or videos on those sites all start playing at once. I want the ability to:
* tell which tabs are making noise at any given moment (a little flashing bubble on each tab would do fine)
* mute a tab's sound
* "solo" one tab with a maximum of two clicks -- all other tabs producing sound are muted
If I could pan/mix each tab independently, that would be even nicer, though most of the players that cause this problem in the first place do allow for individual control.
Another nice feature would be "anything you can see, you can save", negating the need to pile on plug-ins to capture flash video, but I can see why they might not want to offer this by default.
Another one with a somewhat fuzzy target would be "stop loading crap like this". If a site keeps pushing pop-unders from AdultFriendFinder, I want to be able to say to the browser "I just don't want to see their crap, don't even load it" no matter what domain it comes from. As I said, a moving target, but it would be nice.
Finally, it would be nice if I could move tabs between multiple browser windows.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I have 3 different kitchen sink add-ons. One is really good at hot and cold water, one is great at draining, but it crashes if you get hair in there. I use a third for dispose-all purposes.
-- QED
Seriously. I want full Portable Network Graphic support. Yes, Internet Explorer, I am talking to you. Sure, we finally started to get reasonable support for it in 2006. 10 years after the W3C recommended spec. Still not full spec, still not good enough.
Being able to use PNG grapics could have saved me hundreds of hours (more?) over the past 10 or so years I have been playing with web design and development. I don't know why I have heard so little complaining about it all these years. Always just a "Ho hum, yah that would be nice, why dont you just...". BAH! Does anyone else understand how much time is spent fiddling with lame GIF transparency, or creating zillions of images with different background colors so you can make it look like your fancy rounded corners can swap site palates or whatever? Or how about the workarounds for having the logo look good with your nice elastic page with the cool background, looking like it can be totally independent of the background. Well with PNG, IT COULD BE. Or how about the millions of product thumbnails you have to support? Wish they could be PNG, we could then do that redesign and not have to touch all those legacy images.
Of all the things I hate about IE, I hate this the most. Probably because I have been excited about the capabilities of PNG ever since I was told GIF was proprietary and technically I couldn't use it without a license. All this time has gone by, and millions and millions of moneys and hours have been spent finding solutions that, while ingenious, are still not what they could be. By not supporting an image format that has been recommended since 1996.
Fancy new stuff with AJAX? Cool. Good. SVG? Kick ass, I'm fanatic about that format too. You could say it is the new PNG. But give me PNG. Please. Everything cool can be cooler with PNG.
|plastic....or gasoline?|
I want PicLens to be able to browse FTP servers and to show the folders like translucent buildings you can flying by. Also, it must have random lighning-like stripes going from one place to the other doing a "swish" sound in surround sound, so I can feel information is travelling in every direction.
Also, I want to be able to use my Light Cycle to cruise redtube.com and pick up virtual hookers.
...and I want it now.
I want a web browser that will be my floor wax and a dessert topping.
via HTTP, upon first visiting a site, and maybe every 6 months, send an HTTP message where you tell the webserver what your screen and canvas dimensions are, colour depth, etc., so we can get accurate statistics on that. Maybe throw all that user agent funk in a separate message, too, to reduce log sizes.
(okay, this is more a tweak of HTTP, but the browsers would have to support it)
I have been looking for a plug in for firefox but have no found one. Highlight a paragraph of test or the entire page and be able to tell it to open all the links highlighted to open in new tabs in one or two clicks.
Three things that, off the top of my head, I'd like to see in browsers.
* Download Verification
It's 2008, I really shouldn't have to download a file, download a file containing its hash, run a tool on the downloaded file to get the hash, manually determine the format of the hash file, extract the desired result, compare the two, then track down the original download location if they don't match, and try the original file again.
I should be able to click on a link, and wait while my browser tries to download it for me, checks the result, and retries automatically a few times if it fails. The download window should tell me what has failed, what was downloaded with verification (and what type), and what was downloaded without.
How to implement? Extra meta-information embedded in pages containing links as to what the meta-information is. Companion files that contain this meta-information- the browser could decide to attempt to automatically download them if retrieving a file >10MB in size. So forth.
* Client-side Selection of Mirroring
When a page has a whole bunch of images, links to huge files, ISOs, etc- the original server should be able to send a list of possible mirrors to the client, and let the client, based on past successes and failures, choose a mirror automatically. Blend this with something like BitTorrent, and anyone running a BitTorrent client could pull files down that way as well. It'd be worth combining with the verification steps above in order to check the downloads. The original servers could just feed out the file metadata for large files, and let the clients determine where to get it.
* Style Blasting
I clicked that Tao of Mac link in the story summary. It rendered a page whose text area took up 40% of the available screen width (I measured it). I'd love to be able to right-click on such an area, select an "expand" option, and have it rerender the page with that area boosted to take up 75% or more of the available space. If it's still not enough, click it again, and it grows again.
I want my browser, when finished loading a half dozen pages, and sitting idle (except for a few animate GIF's), to not be using 50% of my CPU time. All browsers seem guilty of it these days. I thought it was Flash for awhile, but flashblock only helps slightly. And when a stop and restart of the browser (reloading all the same pages of the prior session) takes 0% CPU, while the former session took, 50%, it really seems like something is wrong.
Is it runaway Javascript? What is going on? I just want a low-memory-footprint, low-cpu-usage browser, and I can't seem to find one these days...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It would be really great to be able to control flash better. Firefox and Seamonkey freak out if I don't have flash installed. When not installed, they both return errors after loading pages with flash.
For example, I load a page and then scroll down using my arrow keys. If the section of page with flash happens to scroll past my mouse cursor, the page freezes and I can no longer scroll. To continue, I have to move my mouse cursor out of the way. I have never figured out why this is the default behavior.
If I am forced to have flash installed for my web pages to work properly, at least give me the tools necessary to manage it. An option similar to the block all images on this page but for flash would be helpful.
Yes, I know I'm getting great software for free and otherwise it works very well, but it still strikes me as strange that Firefox and Seamonkey are dependent on a 3rd party proprietary plugin and they are both broken when it is not installed. I hope I'm not they only one that sees something wrong with this.
http://slashdot.org/comments.
That works fairly well, thank you 0xygen. It's a shame removing flash and java apps are not as direct as removing html objects: the selection process can be a little finicky. I suppose wishing for a kill command for flash objects would be a design feature for Adobe to implement, and not something the browser or an addon could cover. I doubt Adobe would ever bother with such a feature though.
I want support for microformats / semantic web functionality. Things like the Operator extension are nice, but not enough, and not widely used. Make it part of the browser, and we'll see some progress.
Laser beams focused on anyone who uses flash.
How about a built in bittorrent client? It would save me several clicks at least if I could simply click on a bittorrent link on a webpage and have the browser download the torrented file(s) for me to the default location. It would also help establish bittorrent as a standard protocol for legitimate downloads and reduce XIAA lawsuits and campaigns trying to stigmatise it as an agent of communism.
I'd like TTF support. Having to make images or flash for all those headers is a little boring.
I just want it to work, be fast and stable and have a one-click backup button so I can save all my settings
http://tnetech.net/
Can we move web out of browser in future?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher
A network-map like interface to show history and to load linked pages based on a rule list.
This is probably the eye-candy that you need to tempt users (while you secretly and benevolently bundle security features) to switch to the secure, opensource, standards-compliant browser which can render 2D and maybe VRML well from markup.
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
I would like to be able to use drag & drop to select a file that is to be uploaded. That is, drag the file into the browse dialog somewhere, or faster yet, directly onto the browse button or file name entry field.
Now, TFA did mention drag & drop, but I got the impression they were not thinking about this useful obviousity.
Can't be that hard to have rounded corners in all major implementations (see -moz-corner-radius)
MNG support.
Or, barring that, some other way to do use true-colour images without having to resort to proprietary stuff like Flash - or things that aren't actually true-colour, like GIF.
does that, and also allows me to run Flash 32 bits in a 64 bits Firefox.
and so does moz-plugger (runs 3rd party apps as plugins). and so does Gnash (OSS flash player running in a separate process). and so do countless of open source plugins.
But the main problem is that there isn't a standard (yet) for running a plugin in its own sandbox.
most of these plugins use the (quasi-)standard API set by the old netscape for running a plugin from a dynamic library inside the same process.
They just use their library to launch an external plug-in in a separate process.
What we actually need is an IPC *standard* (used by all browsers) for launching and running plugins in separate process.
So adobe won't have excuse anymore to fuck up firefox users' browsing experience.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Maybe we should be thinking what do we want _beyond_ a web browser?"
Blackjack and hookers!
Basically, I want browsers to go away. What I want is an internet programming platform:
1) a programming platform that defines a common binary interface between computers, so as that computers communicate using binary data, not text.
2) the ability to import and run modules from the internet; the platform will handle versioning and management of modules automatically, so as that the administrators are freed from having to maintain applications. The developers will simply post new or updated modules on a server, the platform will download and cache these modules locally on a need basis.
3) a good security model with encrypted communications by default.
4) the ability to persist data types automatically in a database, not in a file system, so as that there is no need for intermediate object mapping layers.
5) the ability to obtain an object proxy automatically by specifying a URL and object name.
All the above will open the road for applications running of the internet. The browser thingy was a good idea, but now its age is showing.
That is, when switching from one module to another, any variables created client-side by the first module can be retained by the client for use by any of the next modules. That way only the last module needs to send the data to the server, reducing overall I/O requirements
I would like to see Flashget make a browser completely focused on easier downloading. Imagine the ease of use! Imagine the cream filled pies we could download!
Like hell I want to send an error report to Microsoft!
All pages are just that, pages. Flat 2-dimensional representations of something that looks like a paper or a magazine.
Why not go 3-D like we see in games or on some desktops?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's what I want.
"Instant" back and forward navigation using the cache. If I want to reload, I'll hit the reload button. Back navigation that traverses past a javascript redirection. I hate it when I go back to a page which just redirects me forward again. Options to not play embedded content until I push a play button. Tooltip on links so I can see where I'm going in full screen mode, since there is no status bar. No opening blank pages on downloads. Show form action when hovering over button in status bar. (to Firefox) Turn off add-on compatibility checking by default. Better control of some options in about:config
I've always thought that there could be much more use of the forward button.
Pages should be able to say 'this link will take you to the next page', the browser can then realise that and act appropriately.
Either it could automagically jump when the user scrolls past the end of the page, after a time period, or simply act when the user presses the forward button.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
"I want a religion that helps all people."
Have you tried Cthulu?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I shut down a browser, I want every file, log, cockie, cahce, everything completly deleted, and those parts of the hardrive written over.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here's my idea that I've been kicking around for a while. We have forward and we have back buttons, but I think we need a next button. The button would increment the character to the left of the right most "dot" in a URL. For example www.someplace.com/1.html would go to www.someplace.com/2.html
The code should be sufficiently robust to handle 009.jpg and 9.jpg (mapping to 010.jpg and 10.jpg respectively) and yes am aware that this will often lead to 404 errors for sites which don't follow a normal ordered sequence of pages. But, for those that do, this will be heaven.
Also, it should be able to process letters in hex-style, but using all 26 letters, but this part is a lot trickier. For example, some time you want a9.jpg to go to b0.jpg but other times you'll want a10.jpg. I figured pick a scheme and stick with it. If it derails the user can change the file name sometimes to put it back on track. I think that most sites would roll over to a10.jpg (figuring it was a series of pictures from the 'a' range) but letting the user pick a scheme in a menu should win over folks who deal with the b0.jpg scheme a lot.
Wheeeee
That is just DRM with a different face, and equally broken. Besides, just compact the JS and it's probably "good enough". If a bank is relying on that kind of excuse for security, it just means it'll take 3 hours instead of 2 for someone to hack them senseless.
More fundamentally, I don't think you *can* effectively firewall against boneheaded moves by people in places of trust such as the aforementioned bank developer.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
We need proper MIDI + audio (e.g. ogg) support without hte use of plug-ins.
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#width4
For Flash and Java you can use AdBlock Plus.
There is an option which adds a little tab to every Flash and Java window allowing you to permanently block it.
FlashBlock might do things like this too - although I have never used it.
CANVAS tag fo yo a$$
I want to be able to go to a site, move the stuff around and have it stay the way I put it when I come back. When I go to a site i don't like, I want to be able to delete it from my web experience and get a 404 next time I go there. Then I want to be able to grab links real easy to make my home page real time instead of having to go out and run a html editor or a editing program to do this. I want a macro language like REXX in my Web Editor to so I can auto surf any way I chose and write my own surfing macros. I want to be able to have my web editor do OCR on PDF files and read the pages to me. I want it to recognize my voice when I say google the distance to paris in light millisenconds and give me a answer. I want it to be able to send the results to someone when I click on their picture. I want the bookmarks that I want to be saved to have their own readily sizable icons with pictures of my choosing and sizes and colors of my choosing based on importance. I want to be able to add links from one site to another in my own little web and share my web with others and be able to see other's shared webs. I want to be able to share a portion of my computer's processor and hard drive on the net via a device link. I want to be able to access device links on the net and hook them to other devices virtual and not. I want to be able to create aliases to various web pages and links and whatnot and be able to surf by aliases I've made up, and share those aliases with others. I want to be able to have a record and playback mode so I can create 'macros' tha preenter fields and click buttons so I don't have to keep repeating myself. Browse is like so read only, I want to be able to create and edit the web realtime not just consume it.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --