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!!!
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
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'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.
Agree with sibling post. The only time any FF install I've got crashes it's the Linux one, whenever I try to kill a flash video before the system is done processing it.
Otherwise it never blips, and I'm a hardcore tab whore: if I can hit CTRL-T I will.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Fast and clean"
Guess what ideal webbrowser and ideal hookers have in common.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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.
"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 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
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'
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.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I absolutely bet it's your flash-plugin. FF3 dies very often for me, when i walk the history with some flash-sites in between. It dies so hard, that the session becemes useless. on windows and linux.
I recommend trying it with flash disabled (=not loadable my the browser!), and when this helps you know the source.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wow I didn't.
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*click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click*
Mmmmmmm. I need a moment...alone...
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.