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?"
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
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***)
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
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
RSS, especially with Google's customizable news feeds, totally rocks. It is by far the very best and easiest way to scan news that matters to me -- at least, using Safari on OS X it is. (I've heard Safari on win sucks, but wouldn't know personally). For the uninitiated, Safari on OS X renders feeds just beautifully, like a web page of all your feeds. Very simple, usable, and obviously without need for some contrived "browser integration" scheme. I also use FF2 with a plugin called Brief on FBSD, that works very much like Safari's integrated reader (though unfortunately *much* slower). If they get that Brief add-on working well in FF3 and fix the crashing on OS X (for those of us using OS X and Shapeshifter) I would happily switch to FF3 for all my machines.
Caveat Utilitor
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."
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.
If you actually read the whole OP, you'd know that he wanted
I'd like a URL bar that searches, you know, URL's when I type them in
In other words, you type part of a URL and FF gives a list of URLs that match.
Really I have a number of disagreements with the "Awesome" bar... I'm not just hacked off by the new search behavior.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
And, the option to open each instance in a seperate process, so one window's crash dosen't take down the rest.
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.
Rather than just adding more features, simplify stuff.
Make Javascript faster and add a JIT and optional type declarations (in progress).
Standardize local storage.
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.
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.
Whatever happened to that idea? In theory the browser dowload speed and render times would be faster.
I know the guy that made these, and in Fx3 they really fly (no pun intended.
http://ctho.ath.cx.nyud.net:8080/toys/rollercoaster.html
http://ctho.ath.cx.nyud.net:8080/toys/3d.html
Real 3D stuff, too. Well, as real as you get on a 3d screen.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
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.