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?"

Comments

I want what most users want.

[Lumpy]

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.

What do _I_ want?

[dotancohen]

What do _I_ want? HTML and CSS compliance. That's it. Get that done first then worry about the 'features'.

Re:Upload progress bar

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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.

Make it possible to select multiple files

[siDDis]

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.

There are so many things I want

[mikael_j]

IMO the most important things for browsers in the near future is the following:

• XHTML and CSS compatibility - To save us all a lot of trouble.
• Memory footprint - It needs to be smaller.
• Stability - When I've got fifteen tabs open I don't want something in one of those tabs to crash the browser.
• Some form of page rendering where browsers are able to render page layout and text without waiting for larger images and such, perhaps by figuring out how to just fetch the dimensions of images from the server somehow.
• Properly sandboxed plugins - I want to be able to let flash run but limit the resources available to it, same for javscript and java applets..

If all this could be done then I'd be pretty happy with the state of web browsers and would stop complaining...

/Mikael

The user must be in charge

[Animats]

The user must be in charge. Not the remote site. Not any "toolbars". Specifically,

• All "toolbars", "branding", codecs, DRM keys, and other installed browser helper objects must show as clearly identified items that can be easily disabled, restored to their initial state, or removed completely.
• Nothing is ever downloaded to any place other than the browser cache without explicit interaction from the user. This specifically includes codecs and DRM code.
• Pages cannot disable menus or menu items. The "back" button always works, although pages are permitted to notice that they were reached via the "back" button.
• If the user chooses to disable popups, all popups must be disabled.
• All pop-ups must be on top. No "pop-unders".
• Pop-ups are treated as subordinate pages of the page from which they were launched. When the parent page closes, so must the pop-up.
• Ad-blocking support should conceal from the remote site that the ad is being blocked.
• Windows that are not on top should be limited in their resource consumption when they have active content running.

You get the idea. When it's user vs. website or user vs. toolbar, the user wins.