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What I really want is a browser that displays information in a clear, unified format that I can customize to my liking. I want this browser to disregard all vi

What I really want is a browser that displays information in a clear, unified format that I can customize to my liking. I want this browser to disregard all visual HTML and CSS rendering, and rather instrument a headless browser to gather the navigation and content from sites. I want to be able to easily make my own instrumentation for sites that do not yet work on this browser. I’m want to allow some branding in the form of one theme color, used for one top navigation bar background, and a site logo there. That’s it. Nothing else. But maybe make this easily customizable with the rest of the interface. In effect, a ”reader mode” but for the entire browsing experience, not just the main content.

tammer 5y ago
The resurgence of the email newsletter in recent times is a sign that, regardless of advances in web and web-connected applications, on a broad timescale open connectivity protocols ultimately hold lasting appeal. Open protocols and techniques that enable effortless parsing of information serve a growing need for users of the web today. While I’m not sure if it will be gopher or something new, I foresee significant disruption potential for whatever effectively fills this need at scale.
allknowingfrog 5y ago
It doesn't address your specific desire (uniform rendering of existing HTML), but the Gemini protocol seems to align with your desire for a simpler internet. It's worth a look if you aren't already familiar. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  I like the idea of Gemini but the reality is 'here's a list of random servers which could be anything but at least our user interface is from the 1980s'. I like how it's lighter than the web, but I don't see how it's 'heavier than Gopher' as suggested (and I have been watching the Gemini project for a few months now). I was on the internet well before the web and I used Gopher all the time. It was great by the standards of the time (ie 1200 baud modems so a page of text like this HN discussion would easily take a minute or more to load and would probably do so with many errors). Gopher was (somewhat) integrated with two other services known as Archie and Veronica for content discovery. It was primitive, but relatively easy to navigate if you knew what you were looking for. What we have here is a bunch of Gemini servers but no concept of user service. Are they blogs? aggregators? malware endpoints? interactive fiction/text adventures? I don't know, and that's not part of the fun. It's as if Gemini has fetishized the least good aspects of the BBS/Gopher/pre-web experience - lack of UI consistency and non-discoverability - in the hope of getting something better by forcing everyone to start over. Nobody* has time for that. Harder doesn't automatically equal better. Gemini would be vastly improved if it presented with some color/minimal formatting (like syntax highlighting controlled at the user end or with typography for the color-blind)and seeded some useful information like mirroring Wikipedia or something that people are already familiar with. There are some Wikipedia proxies (gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi?25) but the only working one I know of is not listed (gemini://vault.transjovian.org). This is Not Great. * hyperbole is always an option To change the world, there needs to be some critical mass of people using it, and to get people using it there needs to be some demonstration of what it's capable of. I want to love it. I have clients (plural) installed. But honestly, I don't want to invest the time figuring out how to make the server do interesting stuff, if I can't find anything very interesting to do with the client. Absent any effort to make it functional for one external thing, it's doomed to remain a toy, or an 'esoteric protocol' that everyone pays lip service to but nobody actually uses. Here's a suggestion: get a gemini HN proxy running. It ought to be super easy given how minimal HN is, and would give people and excuse to have a Gemini browser running all the time.
  - zzo38computer 5y ago
    These are not problems with the Gemini protocol itself. The Gemini clients that I have seen do usually allow the user to change the colours, as far as I can tell. (This is usually better than the document specifying the colours, in my opinion.) Gemini does have a write protocol (I think it is to change "gemini:" at the beginning of the request to "titan:", add some URI parameters for the size and MIME type of the data (I think it might have been better to put those things on the next line (I am not really sure), but well, now it is what it is), and then the data to be written starting on the next line). However, for some kind of things, other protocols would be better. For interactive fiction/text adventures (or other interactive applications), Telnet/SSH will be better than Gemini, I think. For message forums, NNTP will be better. Gemini does have the advantage that the file format is easily readable/writable even if only treated as plain text, you do not need a software to interpret it, but that you can also use a program to interpret it too if wanted and if you do then it is still simple. I would also propose a unencrypted variant. The differences are: The URI scheme is "insecure-gemini" for the unencrypted variant, and 6x responses are not allowed (if a client certificate is needed, it should issue a 3x to redirect to the encrypted version and then the encrypted response will be 6x).
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I have no issues with the protocol - I really like it. I really want this to succeed. I'm talking about the way the protocol is presented to the world, the project as a whole. You need to show people it's cool, it's flexible, it can do useful things while also embodying privacy and low cruft. Otherwise it ends up like Brainfuck - impressively clever, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything. It could be great for education or in many other contexts, but it's important to show something.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Archie and Veronica What I've always found hilarious is how stone-age the comic these were obviously named for was already then, thirty years ago.
hyferg 5y ago
Here's a cook UX project [0] that shows a potential UI-free operating system like you described. [0] https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289 https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289
antics9 5y ago
Mothra in Plan9 or the gemini protocol as suggested.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Opera Browser had this feature for a long time. User styles vs site styles. Either or both could be on or off.
zzo38computer 5y ago
I also wanted some things similar to like that (although without any site branding either). Some web pages don't work properly with CSS disabled. There is ARIA, although it isn't perfect either (and as far as I could tell when I checked, formatting such as bold, fixpitch, etc doesn't seem to work properly with ARIA; this is determined by writing a short HTML file and then viewing the accessible tree (I don't know if I made any kind of mistake)). So, rather I think the way to do is to use a combination of the HTML, CSS, and ARIA to produce a kind of "augmented HTML" which can then be displayed. (If it contains only simple HTML without layout or CSS or whatever, then the same HTML could usually be used.) (ARIA can be used to e.g. find out what is a checkbox etc, so that the renderer can render that element as a checkbox and ignore any CSS and HTML and other stuff that it tries to use to make it fancy.) Supporting the Gemini protocol and text/gemini file format is also good to have, but that is separate. Stuff such as a table of contents window can also be implemented (by looking for the relevant HTML commands in the document which denote headings, sections, etc). (I think I have seen one web browser that can do such a thing for Gemini and Markdown but not HTML. However, it would be possible to do with HTML too (although a bit more complicated).) You could also add such thing as local annotations, form data save/recall, etc. (These would be controllable only by the local user. There would be no HTML or JavaScript commands for documents to control them.) I mean that, to make a better web browser: remove half of the stuff, implement the other half of the stuff differently, and then add some stuff.
btown 5y ago
I've thought often that one could write robust automation engines that boil any SaaS app down into a few functions: search(terms?: string) -> Promise<Item[]> expandItem(itemId: string) -> Promise<Item[]> # gets more details for the given item (e.g. a thread) and any child items (e.g. messages within the thread) ... One could build this for Gmail using https://inboxsdk.github.io/ https://inboxsdk.github.io/ , and other apps ranging from Slack to Google Calendar to Dropbox to your issue tracker du jour with screen scraping, treating each message or ticket or document as an item. Not an easy task as you'd be fighting against the current of rapidly-iterating frontend teams changing class names and structures as they see fit, but doable. The possibilities of how to collate and visualize this data would be endless!
- lelanthran 5y ago
  If you add in `list(grouplist?: string[])` you'll get 99% of the functionality that most controllers in MVC need.
mirrorlake 5y ago
I've been dying for a browser mode that works more like Sublime's Distraction Free Mode (Shift+F11). The main thing I want is the browser to remain full screen, but render webpages as if the browser is about half-width. Blank columns on either side. So many webpages with text are better if you view them at about half-width, and I often end up being forced to leave full screen and manually set the browser width to do this anyway. If anyone knows of an addon or script that accomplishes this, I'm curious to know about it.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Option A: Use Firefox or Edge, press F9. Option B, for when F9 doesn't work: Narrow down your browser to a strip of desired width down the centre of the screen, keep a maximized blank window -- text editor with a new empty file, or something -- behind it. HTH!

tammer 5y ago

The resurgence of the email newsletter in recent times is a sign that, regardless of advances in web and web-connected applications, on a broad timescale open connectivity protocols ultimately hold lasting appeal. Open protocols and techniques that enable effortless parsing of information serve a growing need for users of the web today. While I’m not sure if it will be gopher or something new, I foresee significant disruption potential for whatever effectively fills this need at scale.

allknowingfrog 5y ago

It doesn't address your specific desire (uniform rendering of existing HTML), but the Gemini protocol seems to align with your desire for a simpler internet. It's worth a look if you aren't already familiar. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

anigbrowl 5y ago
I like the idea of Gemini but the reality is 'here's a list of random servers which could be anything but at least our user interface is from the 1980s'. I like how it's lighter than the web, but I don't see how it's 'heavier than Gopher' as suggested (and I have been watching the Gemini project for a few months now). I was on the internet well before the web and I used Gopher all the time. It was great by the standards of the time (ie 1200 baud modems so a page of text like this HN discussion would easily take a minute or more to load and would probably do so with many errors). Gopher was (somewhat) integrated with two other services known as Archie and Veronica for content discovery. It was primitive, but relatively easy to navigate if you knew what you were looking for. What we have here is a bunch of Gemini servers but no concept of user service. Are they blogs? aggregators? malware endpoints? interactive fiction/text adventures? I don't know, and that's not part of the fun. It's as if Gemini has fetishized the least good aspects of the BBS/Gopher/pre-web experience - lack of UI consistency and non-discoverability - in the hope of getting something better by forcing everyone to start over. Nobody* has time for that. Harder doesn't automatically equal better. Gemini would be vastly improved if it presented with some color/minimal formatting (like syntax highlighting controlled at the user end or with typography for the color-blind)and seeded some useful information like mirroring Wikipedia or something that people are already familiar with. There are some Wikipedia proxies (gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi?25) but the only working one I know of is not listed (gemini://vault.transjovian.org). This is Not Great. * hyperbole is always an option To change the world, there needs to be some critical mass of people using it, and to get people using it there needs to be some demonstration of what it's capable of. I want to love it. I have clients (plural) installed. But honestly, I don't want to invest the time figuring out how to make the server do interesting stuff, if I can't find anything very interesting to do with the client. Absent any effort to make it functional for one external thing, it's doomed to remain a toy, or an 'esoteric protocol' that everyone pays lip service to but nobody actually uses. Here's a suggestion: get a gemini HN proxy running. It ought to be super easy given how minimal HN is, and would give people and excuse to have a Gemini browser running all the time.
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  These are not problems with the Gemini protocol itself. The Gemini clients that I have seen do usually allow the user to change the colours, as far as I can tell. (This is usually better than the document specifying the colours, in my opinion.) Gemini does have a write protocol (I think it is to change "gemini:" at the beginning of the request to "titan:", add some URI parameters for the size and MIME type of the data (I think it might have been better to put those things on the next line (I am not really sure), but well, now it is what it is), and then the data to be written starting on the next line). However, for some kind of things, other protocols would be better. For interactive fiction/text adventures (or other interactive applications), Telnet/SSH will be better than Gemini, I think. For message forums, NNTP will be better. Gemini does have the advantage that the file format is easily readable/writable even if only treated as plain text, you do not need a software to interpret it, but that you can also use a program to interpret it too if wanted and if you do then it is still simple. I would also propose a unencrypted variant. The differences are: The URI scheme is "insecure-gemini" for the unencrypted variant, and 6x responses are not allowed (if a client certificate is needed, it should issue a 3x to redirect to the encrypted version and then the encrypted response will be 6x).
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    I have no issues with the protocol - I really like it. I really want this to succeed. I'm talking about the way the protocol is presented to the world, the project as a whole. You need to show people it's cool, it's flexible, it can do useful things while also embodying privacy and low cruft. Otherwise it ends up like Brainfuck - impressively clever, but you wouldn't want to use it for anything. It could be great for education or in many other contexts, but it's important to show something.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Archie and Veronica What I've always found hilarious is how stone-age the comic these were obviously named for was already then, thirty years ago.

hyferg 5y ago

Here's a cook UX project [0] that shows a potential UI-free operating system like you described. [0] https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289 https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289

antics9 5y ago

Mothra in Plan9 or the gemini protocol as suggested.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

Opera Browser had this feature for a long time. User styles vs site styles. Either or both could be on or off.

zzo38computer 5y ago

I also wanted some things similar to like that (although without any site branding either). Some web pages don't work properly with CSS disabled. There is ARIA, although it isn't perfect either (and as far as I could tell when I checked, formatting such as bold, fixpitch, etc doesn't seem to work properly with ARIA; this is determined by writing a short HTML file and then viewing the accessible tree (I don't know if I made any kind of mistake)). So, rather I think the way to do is to use a combination of the HTML, CSS, and ARIA to produce a kind of "augmented HTML" which can then be displayed. (If it contains only simple HTML without layout or CSS or whatever, then the same HTML could usually be used.) (ARIA can be used to e.g. find out what is a checkbox etc, so that the renderer can render that element as a checkbox and ignore any CSS and HTML and other stuff that it tries to use to make it fancy.) Supporting the Gemini protocol and text/gemini file format is also good to have, but that is separate. Stuff such as a table of contents window can also be implemented (by looking for the relevant HTML commands in the document which denote headings, sections, etc). (I think I have seen one web browser that can do such a thing for Gemini and Markdown but not HTML. However, it would be possible to do with HTML too (although a bit more complicated).) You could also add such thing as local annotations, form data save/recall, etc. (These would be controllable only by the local user. There would be no HTML or JavaScript commands for documents to control them.) I mean that, to make a better web browser: remove half of the stuff, implement the other half of the stuff differently, and then add some stuff.

btown 5y ago

I've thought often that one could write robust automation engines that boil any SaaS app down into a few functions: search(terms?: string) -> Promise<Item[]> expandItem(itemId: string) -> Promise<Item[]> # gets more details for the given item (e.g. a thread) and any child items (e.g. messages within the thread) ... One could build this for Gmail using https://inboxsdk.github.io/ https://inboxsdk.github.io/ , and other apps ranging from Slack to Google Calendar to Dropbox to your issue tracker du jour with screen scraping, treating each message or ticket or document as an item. Not an easy task as you'd be fighting against the current of rapidly-iterating frontend teams changing class names and structures as they see fit, but doable. The possibilities of how to collate and visualize this data would be endless!

lelanthran 5y ago
If you add in `list(grouplist?: string[])` you'll get 99% of the functionality that most controllers in MVC need.

mirrorlake 5y ago

I've been dying for a browser mode that works more like Sublime's Distraction Free Mode (Shift+F11). The main thing I want is the browser to remain full screen, but render webpages as if the browser is about half-width. Blank columns on either side. So many webpages with text are better if you view them at about half-width, and I often end up being forced to leave full screen and manually set the browser width to do this anyway. If anyone knows of an addon or script that accomplishes this, I'm curious to know about it.

CRConrad 5y ago
Option A: Use Firefox or Edge, press F9. Option B, for when F9 doesn't work: Narrow down your browser to a strip of desired width down the centre of the screen, keep a maximized blank window -- text editor with a new empty file, or something -- behind it. HTH!