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My Quest for a New Browser

147 pointsby spoluover 11 years ago

20 comments

negativityover 11 years ago
<p><pre><code> Today, our computers are always on, never restarted, always connected. </code></pre> This is a bad thing, not a good thing.<p>My personal machines and devices are not high-availability servers, and don&#x27;t need to be powered on all the time. I close my browser windows, and power off my machines frequently, and deliberately. I generally don&#x27;t gain very much from the practice of leaving the room for an hour, with my machine powered on.<p>I&#x27;d like to dissent from this echo chamber of constantly advocating promiscuous systems, that tend to do things for us without asking us first, and promote biased decisions in favor of permissiveness. I pretty much hate that you can&#x27;t remove the battery from an iPhone.<p>That said, there was an time when client&#x2F;server computing delivered a lot of the kind of functionality, via a fragmented industry of proprietary &quot;enterprise&quot; applications, that has, lately, been re-cast as the broad ecosystem of &quot;mobile apps&quot; (which are essentially the same thing, only smaller and portable). Also, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, &quot;rich web applications&quot; (aka: HTML5+ &amp; JS), have been able to fill in a lot of gaps in web browser behavior with asynchronous requests. I tend to think that JavaScript will become the open version of the once proprietary non-interoperable model of native binaries and client&#x2F;server computing.
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Ellipsis753over 11 years ago
Hello. I&#x27;ve customized my browser (Firefox) quite a lot. Just interested to hear other people&#x27;s options on it. It&#x27;s based around the idea of maximizing vertical screen space while keeping everything I use handy. (I have a widescreen monitor) most websites don&#x27;t even use all the horizontal space where vertical space is really important. Only tangentially relevant to the post but I&#x27;m interested to hear what other &quot;techie&quot; people think and how others customize there browser. Also the screenshots of the ExoBrowser is kind of interesting as it mirrors this fairly unusual horizontal oriented layout that I&#x27;ve seen many programmers using. Screenshot: <a href="https://imageshack.us/a/img855/7486/u9j0.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imageshack.us&#x2F;a&#x2F;img855&#x2F;7486&#x2F;u9j0.png</a> My addons list: <a href="https://imageshack.us/a/img819/2726/7gdd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imageshack.us&#x2F;a&#x2F;img819&#x2F;2726&#x2F;7gdd.png</a> The browser holds up pretty well even with the 258 tabs I currently have open. (Although it does use 4GB of ram.) It&#x27;d be really nice if someone could code an addon to unload tabs from memory if they&#x27;re not used for a while. Anyhow, what are people&#x27;s thoughts on this?
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ianbover 11 years ago
Same idea from a different direction: Firefox OS currently includes a browser built in HTML: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Browser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Gaia&#x2F;Browser</a> with an API: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/BrowserAPI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;WebAPI&#x2F;BrowserAPI</a><p>Of course it&#x27;s embedded in Firefox OS, but Firefox OS is really just Firefox built with special options, so in theory with some work you could expose that BrowserAPI to desktop. And there&#x27;s actually a viable path whereby you could create a new browser as an open web app (<a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Apps</a>) with the permissions to use the BrowserAPI and it could be installed as a normal application, including on desktop. Of course that&#x27;s a bunch of steps and unimplemented bits, but you&#x27;ll be following a path that &quot;upstream&quot; is actually committed to. So committed they actually made just what you describe ;) (Even though the design of the browser is pretty conventional – but it&#x27;s the concept of a browser-built-on-html that you are exploring at this point.)
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__david__over 11 years ago
I think this is very cool. A thin browser with all the chrome parts done in javascript could be good for a number of things. The author touches on browser UI prototyping, but I also see how this could be a lightweight XULRunner competitor.<p>Packaging up &quot;native&quot; apps with node on the backend and html on the frontend could be a very nice thing for cross-platform app writers.
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lucian1900over 11 years ago
This isn&#x27;t too far from Firefox&#x27;s use of XUL.
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angersockover 11 years ago
I&#x27;d kill for a simple, embeddable open-source browser with C bindings and proper JS&#x2F;HTML5&#x2F;CSS3 support (something like Awesomium, but free and with less jank).<p>Berkelium came close, but seems to have been abandoned.<p>Such a project would be of immeasurable use to all the folks who have cool native code that needs a nice-looking GUI.
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spyderover 11 years ago
Why there isn&#x27;t one word about Firefox in the post? You can completely change it&#x27;s UI with javascript and you can use HTML if you don&#x27;t like XUL.
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numeromancerover 11 years ago
Maybe this?<p><a href="http://uzbl.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uzbl.org&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a good project that could use a few hands.
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tallesover 11 years ago
I don&#x27;t want to be a let downer but it seems like a tremendous effort for not so much. How REALLY different this will be than the current add-ons&#x2F;extensions?<p>Maybe I didn&#x27;t get the concept of &#x27;Stacked Navigation&#x27; but looks like a mix of current pages and history displayed vertical instead of horizontal.<p>And synchronized sessions I am pretty sure that if you search for it on chrome store you find more than one plugin for it.
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oscargrouchover 11 years ago
I think this is a very cool idea.. it means people can hack and do experiments with the browser platform.. something the big guys (the one that owns the browsers and the commites) dont like much we do<p>On the other side i think it will find a ferocious competition from the chrome apps.. since there are a web_contents or webview one could embed via extensions..<p>so the big question is, how this idea could distinguish itself enough so it can be competitive with chrome extensions? (since chrome dominate all over?)<p>anyway we need badly that some people stand against some standards and try to do some things better.. it must come from people outside the players.. cause its there innovation really lies..<p>the corporate world took control of all the standards, and freeze it out.. so they can come up with dubious platforms on the other side, or influence standards to comply with a strategy that is good for them..<p>so this open world we all like, are pretty much in danger because &quot;they&quot; are controlling it<p>i think also there is a catch with javascript.. and by allow it to do more, there are a bad effect on the first good thing on html.. that is HTML markup!<p>i mean.. less html and more js code means we are endind with a common language and grammar of communication between computers and people .. with js taking more and more part of it.. we wont be able to understand whats suppose to print in the screen anymore.. it gets more and more obscure, and less standard.. and this in the end will just help the bad guys with their closed platforms..<p>anyway.. this is all things we should think.. theres a lot in stake here.. we need to protect and save what is good.. and we need to be able to distinguish what it is, so we dont end aiding the things we are against to in the first place
Aqueousover 11 years ago
I really like this concept, very much. It seems like a &quot;Dock&quot; for web pages. I find myself opening up the same page twice in a tab all the time throughout the day, since my default move once I can&#x27;t easily find a tab is to open up a new one. After a few hours I have about 40 tabs open, only a few of which I have clicked away from and then re-used, and I find myself tempted to close all of them rather than curate them.<p>We should never open two tab for the same web page, and your solution here seems to prevent that. Nice job - I hope to see it gain some steam.
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Tloewaldover 11 years ago
The exobrowser might be awesome for experimenting with browser ideas, but if it takes off it&#x27;s a gaping security nightmare since now javascript lives outside the sandbox.<p>As I understand it, the exobrowser allows you to load a local html&#x2F;js layout that can embed webcontent objects that behave like top-level frames and the javascript outside the box can presumably see (at minimum) window and url change events inside the webcontents. (Hence, security nightmare.)
b1dalyover 11 years ago
I&#x27;m amazed so many people can leave their computers on for days. I do audio production and also run a lot of utilities on Mac OS 10.6 and 10.8. Both of my computers regularly enter states of non functioning that require reboots (sometimes more than one) to fix. At least once a day.
farmdawgnationover 11 years ago
What do you think will be the performance implications of this? My gut feeling is that straight up C is going to be more performant than JavaScript of any variety, when both are done correctly.<p>Also, do you have any ideas yet about how plugins (e.g. flash, webex, etc) would be handled?
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planckscnstover 11 years ago
Many ways that people use browser tabs are a coping mechanism for an inadequate window manager. My window manager is extremely fast, and provides tags, which are at a minimum like workspaces or virtual desktops, but are really much more than that.<p>With a fresh session, tag 1 is selected. This is the default configuration; the tags can really be named anything and can even be dynamic. Any window that is created is then labeled with the tag that is selected. I can deselect tag tag 1 and select tag 2. All the windows that are tagged with 1 are removed from the viewport and any windows with tag 2 appear. Any new windows are then created with tag 2. I can switch back and forth between tag 1 and tag 2 very rapidly. This is the traditional workspace mode of working<p>I can select multiple tags, doing so will show all the windows that have any of the tags I&#x27;ve selected. Furthermore, if I create a new window, it will be labeled with both tags, and switching (which is really just selecting one tag to the exclusion of others) to either tag 1 or tag 2 will show that window. In addition to labeling new windows with whatever tags are currently selected, I can modify an existing window&#x27;s tags very easily. This system lets me group my windows in a very flexible and easy-to-understand way. All of the shortcuts for interacting with my window manager begin with the &quot;windows&quot; key. That is beautiful, because windows&lt;=&gt;window-manager makes sense, and because applications almost never have their own shortcuts that involve that key, so there are no collisions.<p>On top of the tagging feature, it has some excelent layout modes that automatically place windows how I want them, and those layouts are attached to tags - when I select a tag, it changes the layout to the last layout I applied on that tag. For news browsing and general reading, the layout is always that each window uses the full viewport. When it&#x27;s like this, my window manager looks exactly like a fullscreen browser with tabs. On the tag that I typically do coding activities with, I use a layout that splits the screen vertically into two sections: a primary and supplimentary section. Depending on what I&#x27;m doing, the primary window will either have the code I&#x27;m working on, a view of the output from the code I&#x27;m working on; the supplimentary will have a repl, a shell in the directory where my project is, and a documentation browser. Switching between all these windows is also completely keyboard driven, so I can code away, move to the reference to look something up, then get back to my editor very rapidly.<p>Anyway, that&#x27;s just some of what I have available in my window manager. I almost never use tabs in my terminal, browser, or anything else because the window manager is much more powerful.
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louischatriotover 11 years ago
That&#x27;s a great idea, I&#x27;ll definitely try!
tgandrewsover 11 years ago
Isn&#x27;t this just Chrome OS?
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CoryG89over 11 years ago
Atwood&#x27;s Law hard at work.
dredmorbiusover 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve also been finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream browser offerings. The basic problem: the browser is increasingly becoming a generalized applications platform (Chrome especially). The main benefit of this is in providing rapid application deployments and cloud hosting. The disadvantages are that the browser itself is heavier than lead. Why do I need 1-3 GB of browser to do what 100MB or so worth of mutt can accomplish?<p>Much (most) of my browser usage, though, is based on _content_. And browser tools for surfacing, curating, cataloging, managing, and tracking content are simply <i>awful</i>. In the past year I&#x27;ve discovered both Readability and Calibre. Both are vastly better oriented at the task of <i>actually reading and managing content</i>, though they&#x27;ve got their warts. Readability lacks a desktop app (it runs as a webpage), though the Android client is nice. Calibre lacks Web integration, but has much better content management features than even Readability.<p>Both are oriented more around reading-optimized formats (ePub and PDF for Calibre) than Web browsers are. And their footprints are vastly lower.<p>The first link below details more gripes and suggestions, briefly:<p>Readability features (applies also to ePubs):<p>It renders web pages viewable.<p>It manages my reading list.<p>The reading list is available across different browsers and devices<p>You do not need to have every tab loaded, rendered, in active memory and sucking CPU at the same time.<p>Give priority to the foreground tab.<p>Completely redesign bookmarks with thought given to workflow.<p>Improve responsiveness.<p>The existing Firefox &quot;add page&quot; modal dialog is fucking annoying as hell<p>Provide a duplicate entry search and reconcilliation.<p>Emphasize tags. They&#x27;re present but poorly presented.<p>Emphasize bookmarks for navigation.<p>Improve annotation capabilities, including cross-referencing.<p>Provide a decentralized sharing mechanism.<p>Include a few lines of context from the page.<p>DESIGN THE BOOKMARKS LIST TO WORK AS WORKFLOWS.<p>Provide the ability to download the bookmarks source in offline-readable format. Provide search &#x2F; navigation &#x2F; management of active tabs.<p>Provide search <i>of content across all open tabs</i>.<p>The essays:<p>Browsers: some modest proposals &amp; feature requests <a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/7DoF6HTG3dd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;7DoF6HTG...</a><p>Mozilla readies the browser I wasn&#x27;t looking for <a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/LR7jubsXBgu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;LR7jubsX...</a><p>The content problem in brief <a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/ff9HFxzCKzg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;ff9HFxzC...</a><p>Just installed Readability on my phone Must can haz for laptop. <a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/fVK7aJuBT5Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;fVK7aJuB...</a><p>Vaguely related: Video-in-browser very nearly exactly sucks <a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/jBfVhsdDxBB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;104092656004159577193&#x2F;posts&#x2F;jBfVhsdD...</a>
msoadover 11 years ago
New browser for desktop is not a good idea in my opinion. You have to make it for mobile to make sense. Oh wait, there are many projects that are already doing that