What Will the Browser Look Like In Five Years?

macslocum writes "Opera's Charles McCathieNevile examines the most significant web browser innovations of the last few years, and he looks ahead to the browser's near-term future."

HTML5

[Stan Vassilev]

http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1 [apirocks.com]

Re:In five years...

[Richard_at_work]

Ahem, Opera had 'tab' functionality before Firefox, and I think you are either forgetting or are blissfully unaware of the Netscape-IE browser wars of the 1990s, with new tags and functionality left, right and center from both (some of which the other browser adopted and become standard, some of which weren't and some of which we all wish weren't).

You probably don't even want to know that the whole Ajax thing didn't really even come of age until Microsoft released XMLHttpRequest with IE from version 5, and this was adopted by all browsers eventually (and even MS standardised it as a Javascript object later on).

Re:HTML5

[clone53421]

Did you even read through it?

JS APIs - Web Storage

// use localStorage for persistent storage
// use sessionStorage for per tab storage
textarea.addEventListener('keyup', function () {
  window.localStorage['value'] = area.value;
  window.localStorage['timestamp'] = (new Date()).getTime();
}, false);
textarea.value = window.localStorage['value'];

Use case: Save email draft on the client side (crash-safe)

Re:The literal answer

[shutdown -p now]

Simply put, Firefox doesn't generally screw with my interface on Every. Single. Minor version change (in major.minor.patch versioning that is). Opera didn't through 9.2 either.

Heh, it just shows that you haven't been using it for all that long. Opera is notorious for major UI changes every now and then.

The trick is that, more often than not, it can keep customizations from previous versions. So you set it up once, the way you want it, and don't care about what they do.

The only catch is that betas usually install side-by-side with stable builds, not replacing them, and also use a separate directory for configs - so you have to copy the latter manually. If you only use stable releases, you don't even have to bother with that.