And what features and/or technologies you’d rather not see in a web browser
Lets make this interesting: you can imagine features ( there’s no wrong answers ) , its not just about features that you already saw in other browsers
The thing I want natively is a built-in way to control volume per tab- not just mute, not through a plugin… Just a simple volume slider that works.
- Tab-organisation features (e.g. stacking, trees)
- Synchronised history - so you can find something you were looking at on your phone on your desktop or vice-versa
- Containers (Firefox) are great
- Full-page screenshot (Firefox) is very handy
I want browsers to not choke and die whenever you idle on a video for too long. I’ve noticed this with Chrome and Firefox both. If I leave a YouTube video on idle for longer than a half hour and I come back to it, I gotta refresh or sometimes copy the link, open a new tab, paste it there and go to the video to resume. Sometimes it doesn’t even resume where I left off, gotta start from the beginning.
It’s aggravating.
In part that’s on YouTube and their bandwidth saving measures.
if i open a site that ive opened x times this week/month a popup appears that says “no” then the pc shuts down and cannot be turned on for 3 hours.
saying: “no” sounds rude… maybe something like “no, go touch grass” that’d be better
I want the old animated Netscape logo in the corner back
😏
I’d like to be able to link a web app and its mobile app (lemmy.world and Jerboa for example). And to set a limit to the amount of time I spend on the pair. And have that sync across all my devices.
that’s interesting, I’m not sure I understand the idea, do you want the browser to monitor the mobile app time usage ( Jerboa ), I’m i correct ?
I spend too much time on Lemmy. And I do use an app timer on my phone. I need the website to take away from that same timer as well. When I use the website on my phone and on my laptop. I’m happy to make this clearer.
Data saving option for mobile netwerk , and website’s RSS feed finder , webpage translation too … As for what I don’t want to see : big installation size , ugly design and tracking
website’s RSS feed finder
On Firefox, the RSSHubRadar extension is useful for that.
The feature being available by default in browsers would be cool
Blacklist-based ad blocking.
I don’t mind ads when they’re reasonable. If it helps fund your website at all, advertise away. But when there’s a sticky banner plus an autoplay video ad reducing my mobile viewport to a ridiculous degree, and the X buttons are too small to click and ad loading completely breaks the search bar until it’s done (hi fandom wiki) I want to be able to say “fuck these ads in particular”
I really just want web browsers to die, and be replaced by one of the slimmed down options like gemini, gopher, or some markdown viewer.
The web just keeps getting increasingly bloated and ad-ridden, and filled with popups. Web browsers are as complex as entire operating systems now, so only 2 orgs (google and mozilla) have the resources and expertise to build a browser, and mozilla might throw in the towel eventually, leaving the internet as one big google ad.
IE move viewing of mostly static content into these simple variants like gemini, and move dynamic things to local apps with API access.
that’s a quite pessimistic stance, yes I do agree that web browsers are complexe and hard to maintain, but they can do more than viewing websites, you can play games, draw art, video chat, PDF viewing and editing, you can do a lot with just one app… that’s the beauty of Web browsers… The problem is in the Ad business model…
they can do more than viewing websites
The question is: should they? There is a larger philosophical divide about whether software tools should be small and purpose-built, or monolithic. Having one do-it-all tool can be convenient but also creates a huge amount of overhead and complexity.
I go back and forth myself. I love the convenience of monolithic tools, but miss the way a small, purpose-built tool can really do its job well.
One of the best cases for building a versatile tool, is accessibility to less privileged populations, for example people who can’t efford to have a reliable Internet because of their shady ISPs, they need a browser that renders web content as fast as possible, and also because they can’t afford to download apps due to slow internet speeds, Flatpaks could take gigabyte of HDD space and you have to update them later, which is painful in other parts of the world
Even if the user had a reliable Internet and solid hardware, maybe they’re a security minded individual, and want to keep their app installs to a minimum. To them many apps are considered bloat and that’s dangerous.
I think the difficulty lies in wisely choosing what features to include, before your users start asking : hey, do we really need that ? Or : who uses that ?
that’s why listening to feedback is so important
As an addition to the translation tool (context menu in Firefox) it would be nice to have a conversion tool for the conversion of temperatures and lengths. I know there are addons for this purpose, but last time i checked they weren’t good or they were a hassle to use. Opera nailed it a few years ago with a little pop-up window when text got highlighted. It recognized when it was a SI unit. This is a feature that I have not seen in any other browser yet.
