HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is it time for a new browser?

9 points by nuttendorfer ↗ HN
Recently I've seen more and more comments on HN and on other sites about the history of browser becoming bloated and needing to be replaced. Chrome replaced Firefox for many and, while lightweight and fast in it's early days, it has too become bloated; they are even working on a terminal emulator[0].

I'm also seeing a rise of distrust towards Google, as they are growing in size. Google is the new Microsoft but it's still 'cool' in the tech world. We must not forget that Google's business is that of serving advertisement, all their products are geared towards this. Yet they also improve the web by pushing open standards (Although the HTML5 player on YouTube, e.g., is inferior to the Flash player).

While Chrome never was very configurable (How does one change the shortcut for opening a new tab) Google really cut in this area. Without an extension you can't even change the New Tab page, and their recent revamp of it certainly isn't popular with everybody.

Now I ask you, HN, do you think it's time for a new browser? There is an incredible concentration of smart, competent people on HN and I think that this could be project carried out by this community. This is the chance to really scratch an itch and a lot of people would profit from this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344678

24 comments

[ 9.9 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] thread
rodw
Have you see Uzbl? http://uzbl.org/

Their tagline is "web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy".

Uzbl is WebKit, and very little else. Highly script-able and customize-able.

nuttendorfer
Uzbl seems to be a really cool project, but I'm stuck on Windows for most of the day.
xer0
Never heard of it, just tried it. I can see this ending up being my favorite browser, if I can peel off the time to figure out bookmarks. If I understand, the answer is "manage them yourself," which is mostly thrilling if slightly off-putting. I'll try to get to that soon.
rodw
I've only recently come across it myself. When I find the time to set up bookmarks and a low-maintenance ad block script I think uzbl may become my favorite browser as well. (Embedding uzbl in emacs would also be quite handy for in-frame web site testing or online reference materials.)

There are samples of each of these (and more), but like many FOSS projects a fair bit of the documentation is incomplete, out-of-date or both.

I love that uzbl adheres to the "unix-philosophy". Very powerful. For example, with uzbl it should be trivial (well, straightforward at least) to generate image thumbnails of web pages or to create an automated functional testing framework.

Uzbl should also be useful for kiosk applications, as you can easily obscure or lock down most of the general-purpose browsing controls.

dholowiski
What would be the features you'd like to see in a new browser, other than 'fast'? I think seamless synching of history/bookmarks/passwords over all platforms including mobile would be nice. What else?
nuttendorfer
I'm actually thinking less is more here, I can't think of the last time I've even thought about using autofill for forms. Of course syncing is important, but actually one of the more nice-to-have features. The important things IMHO are: speed/efficiency, interface/usability and how easy it is to customize the browser. I can't even think of a reason why Google chose to omit configurable shortcuts.
16s
1. Send random user agent on each connection.

2. Never send referrer.

3. Built-in blocking of all tracking and ads.

4. Javascript disabled by default.

retroafroman
While I agree that having a super detailed UA string sent isn't in the best interest of my privacy, there is a sort of "tragedy of the commons" problem if everyone did that. If website maintainers/webmasters/web developers didn't collect that data, they wouldn't know what platforms to optimize and account for when designing. (Yes, best practices dictate that a website should work well on all platforms, but best practices aren't always followed.)
c_t_montgomery
JS disabled by default - seriously? So many apps nowadays rely on it and are JS-driven. I can't imagine how that would be a better experience, regardless of what you think of the language.

Can you please elaborate more on that one in particular and why you'd want it?

mgkimsal
I want to see up front viewing of cookie data per request. This should have been there day one so people could have more control and visibility over what's being tracked about them, and easier ways to delete cookies. It would have avoided years of paranoia and misinformation.

Also, a "find" bar "on" all the time in a browser (as if someone hit ctrl-f when the page opened) so people realize they can actually search in a page instead of slowly scrolling and wasting their time.

killnine
are we all now moving towards "keep your hand out of my cookie jar" ?
nuttendorfer
The average user doesn't even know about cookies and is very easy to profit from. Privacy should be more important than it is today.
polyfractal
I don't think this would help. I've watched people deal with the unknown SSL certificate prompts in Firefox...they just mash "OK" "Accept" "Agree" until the SSL warnings go away.

Only a handful of sites use SSL certs, but every site uses cookies. Many sites use multiple cookies. Can you imagine the nightmare of that many popups asking you about every cookie?

mgkimsal
I said nothing about popups. popups are horrible. Once you've said yes or no to them, you can't ever go back and review what you did.

A small sidebar widget that opened when clicked to give you a clear view of the cookies that are associated with the current page, with a quick 'delete' on each or all if you're not comfortable with the info there, would be great.

It shouldn't require firebug or 4-5 levels of "advanced" preferences menus to view stuff like that. That level of hiddenness contributes to paranoia about stupid stuff. In some sense we're a bit past that (I'm thinkin 1997-2000 era panic about "cookies") but it still continues with new generations of users, and it's not gotten any easier to view this fundamental stuff that's being tracked right on your own computer.

killnine
I would like to see a browser that is keen on letting me know vulnerabilities by being very verbose about them, but without getting in the way.

For example if facebook is eating my browsing data on other sites just because I have logged into facebook, or even while I log out (http://soshable.com/facebook-tracking/) then this (also-very-fast) browser would let me know this in case I want to do something about it

wladimir
I've always liked to have a browser in which each tab (or window, and then allow sharing between tabs) is isolated, like a separate profile in Firefox. No cookie sharing, no cache sharing, and block all other tricks to communicate and find out what is running in other tabs or what other sites you're logged in to.

In OSes there is more and more isolation between processes, why not at a browser level too. It improves security (no more CSRF, for starters) as well as privacy (sites can no longer track you as easily).

Donito
Internet Explorer does that. Use Ctrl + Shift + P for opening an InPrivate windows. Every window runs in its own process.
wladimir
Interesting! But would this be supercookie-proof? (site local storage, flash cookies, cache tokens, etc?)
hkarthik
I like the idea of a hacker centric browser that peels away the cruft that typical end users like to see and makes Inspecting HTML/CSS, Debugging JS, and Performance Diagnostics a first class citizen in a better way than Web Inspector or Firebug do.

Being able to have an easy way to switch rendering engines on the fly but retain the same tooling would also be pretty damn awesome.

While a community based effort for this would be cool, I would totally pay money for something like this.

c_t_montgomery
Just out of curiosity - what are your beefs with (Chrome) Web Inspector? I think it's fantastic, but am interested in hearing your opinion(s).
[dead] joelly
I was going to disagree, but then I noticed that Chrome has been around for three years now... and realised the futility of that argument.
xer0
I would like the ability to access and manipulate all of "my" browser data in a pipelined command line environment similar to a shell. I want to be able to easily get at all my bookmarks, tabs, plugins, tabs, the dom, history, cookies, super cookies, megalomaniacal cookies, etc, i.e. everything that changes the browser due to my actions, and list it, count it, query it, twist it and tease it.

I'd like that data and environment to be available from within the browser, and bonus points if I could easily get at it from a traditional [[t]c|k|z|da|ba]sh shell.

And I'd rather use a shell-like language, not javascript, but if javascript were the only way to do this then hell yeah I'd use it.

wanderer
I would like a webkit based browser that can only open local files. I want to be free of the security restrictions (as I understand them) which do not allow me (for example) to save the text I enter in a textarea to a file on my desktop. Finally, I do not want to use a local server.

I do not want to deal with local servers either

SuperChihuahua
I want something like "The 4-hour-web-browser" inspired by the book "The Four Hour Workweek." A web browser that limits the number of pages you can view each day to save time. Do you really need to visit Facebook 5 times each day? If you try to visit Facebook 2 times the web browser says No!