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
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!
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.....
I'd like an upload meter.
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
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.
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.
Bullshit, if they did that, then you'd come back and bitch that it doesn't search thoroughly enough.
Opera's searches both, if the URL, or the Title contain the query, it displays the URL and associated Title, or vice-versa, with the query in bold.
Firefox does the same, just displays it a bit differently, and IE doesn't seem to do it at all, just the normal auto-complete type thing.
So, i'll presume, and simply say "stop using IE"
"Fast and clean"
Guess what ideal webbrowser and ideal hookers have in common.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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 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
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.
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.
You can accomplish the same thing with a few different settings. I have firefox configured to delete all cookies when I exit, except ones on my whitelist. You can change what each site in the exception list does. You can configure it to not accept cookies at all, and then sites in the exception list can keep them for the session or until they expire, as per your configuration. I also have it configured to clear out my cache and history when I exit too. If you don't want to go that far, you can go to tools->clear Private Data, to clear that stuff whenever you want.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
does that, and also allows me to run Flash 32 bits in a 64 bits Firefox.
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.
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
Don't forget that they both should take up as little space in your memory as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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
This could be a great start to the modular vs. monolithic kernel debate! Where is Tannenbaum when you need him :(
Have you tried Lynx?