What Do You Want On Future Browsers? 628
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?"
stability? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
mathml support and full unicode (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
An upload meter? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like an upload meter.
Fast and clean (Score:2, Interesting)
Upload progress bar (Score:5, Interesting)
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:stability? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Stable plugins (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox had the progress bar working for uploads for a while, but then it broke [mozilla.org]. 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!
Better Cookie Handling (Score:1, Interesting)
Better cookie handling
A Mute Button (Score:5, Interesting)
SAFETY (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Is client programming really all that bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:mathml support and full unicode (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh. I think browsers tend to go for the greedy / line-by-line algorithm because it's fast and works well with incremental layout (e.g. if you receive the page from the server slowly). The speed argument may be less important since it can be argued that reading speed is more important than layout speed (cf the recent change to support kerning and ligatures). There are also internationalization issues with hyphenation. See Mozilla bug 67715.
Is entire-paragraph hyphenation always expected, or only expected for justified text?
Mainly what I want... (Score:1, Interesting)
...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. [mozillazine.org]
Unimpressed.
Back in the day.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is client programming really all that bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
Site Filter (Score:2, Interesting)
Sockets (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
Re:stability? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I want my broswer to well, browse the web. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:3, Interesting)
native support for video (in the form of the tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
I thought that was because it just wasn't finished in time for Firefox 3.0, hence why they're implementing it in Firefox 3.1 [mozillalinks.org] instead. If Mozilla are worried about submarine patents, they've kept that very quiet. Apple have been quite vocal [whatwg.org] of their worries about submarine patents in Theora, while Nokia seem to have objected [w3.org] without knowing quite what it is they're objecting to, but Mozilla supported [pcworld.com] making it a part of the HTML 5 spec.
Re:Back in the day.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats "kinda nice" in theory, but only as an Opt-In, and I can't see very many people liking it.
Especially not those still on Dial-Up, or slow DSL, having half or more of their bandwidth helping "other people"... I shouldnt have to build a porch for my neighbours, simply because I already built my own.
Plus, I imagine security would become an issue, anyone with a web-browser could potentially find out what you have been browsing since the last time the cache was cleared, or even much longer considering something has to tell the new clients that "hey this guy was there once too"... right now its generic "he visited www.xxx.com", but having a BT-Linked network, means they would know each page you visited, if you opened/expanded an image or pop-up, etc...
Would also be quite curious, during say a fairly large power-outage that knocks out a couple main HUBs/ISPs... watching the internet frantically attacking (spamming?) anyone that might have a cache of the sites that are now down potentially creating an even larger problem.
Become the Operating System (Score:3, Interesting)
Forward / Back with branching (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A less "Awesome" URLBar Would be Nice! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I want what most users want. (Score:5, Interesting)
A working cache (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
simplify (Score:2, Interesting)
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 "tiny" mode (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Simple wishes (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [isthis4real.com].
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.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:2, Interesting)
The progress bar that Firefox had was pretty useless since most users didn't even notice it. As others have said, uploads should receive the same treatment as downloads...perhaps even integrating it into the downloads window in some sort of tabbed interface where you can switch between downloads and uploads. Most BitTorrent clients have a pretty good transfers window that could be used for inspiration. Of course this could open up the Pandora's Box of users asking why FireFox isn't a BitTorrent client, but maybe it should be.
But I'd like to go one further and add JavaScript hooks for uploads (and perhaps the corresponding hooks for downloads). Something like onUploadProgress would allow sites to display content to the user during the transfer in the same way that OS installs will display tips to the user. Even without the native upload monitor, having JavaScript hooks would allow developers to give the user feedback on the progress of the upload without having to resort to some hackish polling solution (something I've been forced to do at two successive jobs now).
Binary XML/HTML/JSP (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Upload progress bar (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it to be the same for sound and animated GIFs. They're mostly unwelcome distractions.
All the people watching YouTube disagree with you.
I compare them with regular newspapers or magazine articles. We have images on both of those. But we don't have video.
I'm sure that if it was possible to embed video into newspapers or magazine articles, it would have been done long ago. Now we have the web, which makes exactly that possible.
And I thought I was old-fashioned. Even I can see the utility of embedding video into web pages. Yeah, it's frequently annoying, but so are advertising images. That doesn't mean I want to cut out all images on the web; instead, some smart people invented ABP (Ad Block Plus), so I can see all the useful images, and none of the advertising ones. If they haven't already done it (it's not like I disable ABP to see what I'm missing), I'm sure the same technique can be used to screen out annoying videos without blocking the useful ones.
Re:Why only 2D Vectors? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [nyud.net]
http://ctho.ath.cx.nyud.net:8080/toys/3d.html [nyud.net]
Real 3D stuff, too. Well, as real as you get on a 3d screen.
Show me the source of the sound, mute button (Score:4, Interesting)
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.