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

stability?

[story645]

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.

Re:stability?

[arth1]

The important words there are web tasks. I don't want a browser that does e-mail, instant messaging, feed aggregation, balances my check book and feeds my dogs. I want a browser where the unnecessary features have been removed, and those who want them can add them themselves. No add-ons as default, thanks!

Seamonkey works best for me at present -- you can at least choose to install it without all the features, unlike Firefox with comes with the kitchen sink as standard. Which is kind of ironic, considering that Firefox was meant to be the leaner alternative to the Mozilla Suite, and Seamonkey is the continuation of the Mozilla Suite.

Re:stability?

[Sloppy]

Sounds like a good wishlist item for future browser: have plugins run as separate process with very limited (or more importantly: well defined) IPC with the browser, probably running as user "nobody." If a plugin crashes, browser crash should not be an option.

In other words, have the browser treat plugins as just as dangerous as data from the 'net.

mathml support and full unicode

[WillAdams]

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

Stable plugins

[Chlorus]

I want some degree of protection from the entire browser crashing when a plugin misbehaves(***cough*** flash ***cough***)

An upload meter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like an upload meter.

Upload progress bar

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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.

Re:Upload progress bar

[jesser]

Firefox had the progress bar working for uploads for a while, but then it broke. There is pretty much nobody working on Firefox's networking code, so minor bugs like that tend to pile up more so than in other components of Firefox :( If you know someone who enjoys working on C++ networking code, please send them our way!

Re:Upload progress bar

[CastrTroy]

I think the problem with a tag is that the sites hosting the video won't use it. I mean, if they really wanted you to be able to just download and watch the video, they would have just put a link to a .mpg, or .avi. Instead what they want to do, is to ensure, as much as they can, that you are watching it in your browser window, so that all the ads show up on the side, and so that you can't save a copy. By using tricks such as using flash, or storing the actual URL inside a playlist file, inside a playlist file, inside a playlist file, inside a playlist file, inside a playlist file, they can stop most casual users from downloading a copy of the file, or watching it in a program that is not their browser.

A Mute Button

[camperdave]

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.

SAFETY

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Back in the day....

[mark-t]

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.

Sockets

[Jerf]

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.

Re:I want my broswer to well, browse the web.

[clang_jangle]

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.

Forward / Back with branching

[FunkyELF]

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.

Re:I want what most users want.

[Ethanol-fueled]

And, the option to open each instance in a seperate process, so one window's crash dosen't take down the rest.

Show me the source of the sound, mute button

[Mal-2]

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.