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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?"
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.
I upgraded firefox and now it decides to crash every 15 minutes, when it used to only crash every half our. (...)
What could you possibly be doing to crash Firefox every 15 minutes? It sounds like you've got something else wrong to me. Time for a system reload.
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.
Two more things I'd like to see: native support for vector graphics (in the form of SVG) and native support for video (in the form of the <video/> tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
How nice it would be to have integrated video support directly in the browser, though. No need for all of the hackish solutions, such as anything Flash-based, that have grown up around this gaping capability hole in the original spec. Make embedding videos into a webpage as easy as embedding text. That would be an amazing feature for a future browser.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
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.
Give me 3D vector graphics, and let me play Battlezone in the browser!
3D vector graphics sounds nice, but (and no offense) I'd rather there was less convergence of the browser and the desktop environment.
Browsers are inherently buggy and exploitable, or include technologies that are. Until security is locked down tight, IMHO, we should not be moving to a place where the browser does more.
/If it isn't clear, I'm also not a fan of browser based webapps.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A game like Battlezone is actually well served by 2D vector drawing. All you have to do is do a quick rasterization of the vertexes (x2d = x3d/z3d, y2d = y3d/z3d), then pass the result to the 2D vector routines. Rendering engine done.
While I can't view the site right now, COMET support sounds like one of the more interesting feature requirements. The only thing that I don't get is (and maybe this is explained on the currently-slashdotted site), isn't this solved by Server-Sent DOM Events? That effectively provides a smooth and scalable form of COMET support. Of course, only Opera supports it at the moment, so maybe that's the problem...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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
This isn't 2002, browsers should be above that.
Sure the browser can be, but Flash is a plugin, not a browser and a poorly-written plugin for any platform other then Windows. So think of Flash as a program running in the background that display's the contents in your browser window. Can a program crash? Yep. So can Flash crash and make your browser slow? Yep.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Couldn't you just measure the amount of data sent out over the connection? If you only count the stuff that the server has sent back the ACK packets for, you could probably get a pretty good indication of the progress of the upload. It wouldn't represent the size of the file on the actual server, but it would be a really good indicator. I think part of the problem is that it requires going a little bit more low level than generic posting code that the browser would usually call, but there's no reason it couldn't be done.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You don't need to poll the results and it's not a shortcoming of HTTP. You know how much data you have sent, and you know that the server has received it because of the TCP acks.
No, it really is the fault of the browser vendors and nobody else. You don't need an addition to the HTTP protocol, in fact such a thing is pointless because it's already handled at a lower level of the networking stack.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
I agree. And I want that button to send a Taser(tm)-like shock to the developer who thought I'd want any sound at all to play automatically.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
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.
With experts-exchange.com just scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the content. Or use the cached version Google has.
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.
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
Besides the obvious answers ("Laziness" and "Microsoft did it to us"), there is the issue of complexity.
These days, systems are so complex that many times it is simply faster to reinstall.
I don't like this any more than you do. If you don't find the cause, there is a good chance you will have the same problem again.
morcego
Windows operating systems are inherently buggy and exploitable, or include technologies that are. Until security is locked down tight, IMHO, we should not be moving to a place where the Windows operating system does more.
Fixed.
Since you're so clever, please tell us:
Through what path do the vast majority of Windows OS exploits travel to reach the desktop?
A) Web Browsers
B) Desktop Programs that connect to the internet
C) Portable Media (CDs, DVDs, USB Drives, etc)
D) Other (Please explain)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For example I can compile Firefox -O3 (or get a Swiftweasel binary) and it will run at a fast speed on lower-end hardware, Opera being binary-only doesn't allow this.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Go on, make my day. Do it, and do some benchmarks, or heck, just try actually using them both. I guarantee you Opera will blow your firefox out of the water, speed optimizations or none. There's only so much a compiler can do.
Number 2, it used to be adware and how can I really trust a browser that used to be adware, something that my browser is the first line of defense in combating it?
It wasn't adware in the way it's commonly used nowadays; it had one banner ad at the top of the browser, all revealed very obviously up front, and that was it. As for why you can trust its anti-adware capabilities, again, look at the results. And look at Opera's security record, and compare it to firefox or anything you like.
Also, even though it isn't adware, there could still be bits of the adware code in the source slowing it down,
There could be. But it runs a lot faster than firefox anyway, so until someone releases a slightly faster version, why does that matter?
I am trolling