9 ms·

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

92 points by meandave 3y ago

bee_rider 3y ago
I’m not sure exactly what the proposal is, but a server in ever web browser so you could host, like, a little tiny social media and file sharing site could be nice.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  But then wouldn't you want to sync it between your devices ? Wouldn't it be nice if your tiny social media site was available while you're on vacation at the beach ? Would be also convenient to have it in some place with a cheap and plentiful internet connection ?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I’m sure it could be hosted on my phone. Bandwidth-wise, it should be fine to host over the cellphone network, I’m not very interesting, I’m sure I’d only get one or two visitors a week.
- theamk 3y ago
  Opera tried this in 2009 (as article briefly mentions), it was called Opera Unite: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands... Almost no one used it back then, and it would be even fewer people now. After all, the time of always-on machine which can act as a server "for free" are gone. Even desktops sleep nowdays when not used, and no one would be crazy enough to kill their cellphone/tablet battery to run something that can be served by cloud faster, more reliably and often for free.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  My product, DownloadNet, merges server capabilities with web browsing, creating an offline search engine from your browsing history. This article echoes the innovation we're driving forward, despite this article's occasionally exaggerated and insensitive tone. Berjon, points out that despite being a cornerstone of the web, browser design has stagnated, suggesting we re-envision browsers to enhance user control. He argues for integrating browsing, search, and social media, and imagines browsers as 'agents' with server-like functions, offering services like personalized data management. Berjon also critiques tab management and the current browser business models, advocating for reinvestment into the web. He's hopeful for change, emphasizing financial incentives for innovation. Particularly intriguing is the concept of Personal Data Servers, aligning with my vision for a federated search engine in DownloadNet, which could evolve into a social sharing tool where you publish your local search engine for others to use: https://github.com/dosyago/DownloadNet https://github.com/dosyago/DownloadNet Notably missing is the role AI could play in amplifying user agency within this framework. At my company, we're crafting BrowserBox to redefine browsers as empowering user agents. It’s an open-source initiative critical to the web’s future: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
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mapt 3y ago
> Technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate. But the product view beats the architectural view every time. The question isn't "should we or should we not bundle these concerns?" but rather "given that these concerns are bundled up in actual real-world use and perception anyway, what underlying design can we come up with so that the resulting architecture makes sense?" Visceral reaction: Outside of FLOSS, technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate because bundling them is often the first step to an over-aggressive capitalism entirely consuming their utility. The "Feed" that eventually becomes a heavy advertising venue or even a brainwashing tactic, has destroyed Twitter, and Facebook, and others as user experiences, rendered things like Youtube into potent infohazards, become a foundation for post-free-speech worlds in which the Platform is expected to Moderate Content for rightthink because the Platform is (for the sake of engagement!) deciding what to show you in an Editorial Capacity. The corruption of Google Search, or the Amazon review functionality, or then the Amazon search functionality, is a major short-term loss for human agency at least as big as the writer envisions, and it's being done because bundling different concerns provides an opening, gives the corporate board an erection during quarterly P&L briefings. Over the Possibilities. If you care about the user experience, consider how long my grandfather's wrench was permitted to remain a wrench, rather than autonomously transforming into a screwdriver, or a brick, or a nice welcoming block of cheese, or a magazine subscription, or a bonfire, or Ebola. The owning entity only has to learn how to use the wrench once a generation; The interface does not drastically change to combine my love life, my choice in cereal, and my ability to tighten bolts. I have to re-learn some online tools once per YEAR because somebody is bundling something in a way that is in the short term slightly more profitable. I have a closet full of useful tools that don't exist on my cognitive plane any more and I'm not sure I want to investigate deeply enough to figure out what cosmic horror they became. In order to preserve my agency, I need to be able to flip back and forth between those tools and summon up capacities that I have not engaged in for several years; The state of web applications (and by extension, the browser) makes me as a tool-using ape feel like I have dementia with the number of holes that now exist in my knowledge versus my past self. You don't need a bigger browser. You need a predictable environment that you can buy and own, that doesn't tear itself to shreds when you're not actively handing it a geometrically larger amount of money every five minutes. Most layering violations (outside of FLOSS) that you observe are trying to pick your pocket with one hand and scramble your neocortex ("The way you THOUGHT that the platform worked") with an icepick with the other. No, my use of tabs may not be Technically Optimal. It is a way of organizing information. But it's predictable, and it's within my cognitive grasp, and it lets me do a great many things without entirely losing track of them. I don't want to have to relearn an entire means of organizing my information because you thought that my tabs belonged in your bookmark service†, or in your AI personal assistant†, or that they should be tidy and Bring You Joy. I don't want somebody to rearrange the papers on my desk; That would be profoundly disturbing because it breaks the model for how I think, how I predict things, and how I remain effective. †Which you DEFINITELY will refrain from charging a subscription for. For a year, maybe even two, before seizing that chunk of my exocortex.
Mistletoe 3y ago
If I had to guess, Google will only change Chrome in ways that make it more money. Browsers could do all kinds of awesome things but Google isn’t going to do any of it if it interferes with sending people to ads. It would be kind of nice if the majority browser wasn’t owned by the people selling you ads.
- greenyoda 3y ago
  I agree, but nobody is forced to use Chrome. If Firefox (which I use) were to implement some really useful features that Chrome didn't have, maybe more people would start using it. Chrome may be the default browser on Android, but Firefox is as easy to install as any other app in the Play Store.
  - Ayesh 3y ago
    As browsers have reached the feature plateau, I still like the pace Firefox is innovating. I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace. Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".
- zx8080 3y ago
  Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads. DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now. It's actually very clever: once banks start blocking non-DRM browsers, that's a game over for all opensource and competing projects. The browser (and therefore the internet for most of the population) will then be controlled by the largest ads corporation in the history. Sad, but this kind of an entrenching seem to go very quick and very well in the mobile land (see second part of the comment [0]). 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214
Aerbil313 3y ago
This actually makes sense… Why isn’t Mozilla rolling out ad tracking to Firefox for it to fund itself? Oh yeah, they’re already getting all the money they need from Google.
- autoexec 3y ago
  I assume the real answer is that because the moment they did there'd be a thousand forks and nobody would use Mozilla's browser anymore Updates would probably slow down a lot, but I doubt that everyone would stop working on it, and that nobody new would step up to maintain whatever the most popular folks were.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    Your comment is assuming that people don’t get funding through ads for nonprofit open source projects is a good idea. Which they may not.
eduction 3y ago
What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms? This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  What he's actually proposing are Web Tiles[1], which he explains in the next article in this series. Basically a move from web pages as Internet-connected applications to being locally-cached reusable components that compose into workflows. 1: https://berjon.com/web-tiles/ https://berjon.com/web-tiles/
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    Someone should write an article about that then because this series of articles does a poor job of explaining both the problem and the solution.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      Even the linked page doesn't contain the phrase "web tiles" outside of the title and a link back to itself
      - ArabicBaklava 3y ago
        i tried chatgpt prompts, still not getting much out of it either
- b33j0r 3y ago
  I agree. These ideas are poetry, based on our jazz standards and hymns. I disagree with “a good book is one that confirms what you already believe,” even if Willy Wonka writes it.
- keepamovin 3y ago
DennisP 3y ago
A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.
- agg23 3y ago
  If you're a Mac user, Arc Browser does exactly that, at a configurable time interval. I have too many long running projects, so I don't like Arc for precisely that reason (and the vertical tab display doesn't scale well when mobile).
  - charlie0 3y ago
    I've been using it for a while, but it's a free product, so I can't help but wonder what kind of data they are siphoning off me to sell. Of course, Chrome does that as well, but it's a mega company and I trust them from a security perspective more than Arc.
- clouddrover 3y ago
  > A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - mostlylurks 3y ago
    The usability of bookmarks is far worse than that of tabs. With tabs, I can just middle click in the relevant window and the tab will be in the right place, waiting for me. With bookmarks I have to either spend a lot of effort putting the bookmark into the right folder, or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks. And I'd have to remove the bookmarks once I'm done with them. And as someone who opens up hundreds of tabs and returns to many of them only several months later, bookmarks serve a different purpose in my workflow than tabs. Tabs are single-use; I close them after I consume the content in the tab and never open them again. Bookmarks are reusable, pages which I may want to return to multiple times.
julianeon 3y ago
Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes. I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen. In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them. Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed. The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a window has been at the tab limit for a couple days and wasn't compelling enough for me to act on before, I'll close all its tabs. If I didn't take notes about it or process it in some way, too late, gone now. I actually do take screenshots of some of my tabs, full page screenshots, which I think in practice is my 'bookmarking' system. I title the file with what it's about - say, "shadcdn.png". Now it's 'saved', in theory anyway for me to look at at some undefined future date (no hurry). That's my system, which works well enough.
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  Wouldn't PDFs be a better way to save them? Full page screenshots glitch out me about half the time, esp sites that use js to muck with scrolling
  - julianeon 3y ago
    This is pretty tightly tied to my particular setup on Ubuntu, using scrot to screenshot and feh to view images and the terminal to rename them, but here's the issues I'd have w PDFs... The biggest problem is that sounds more verbose. I'd be saving the page as a PDF, but then I'd have to hunt more to find out why I saved it, since save as PDF often extends beyond one page iirc. Really one page of screenshot is plenty for my needs. Also PDF's are a lot "heavier" than images. I can scroll through 50 images in a minute, using feh. I don't know how I'd go through multiple PDF's actually, but in any case I imagine in the best case scenario it's still slower. The effort of loading 10 PDFs would deter me from doing it as often, I think. Finally, using scrot to get the screenshot, it's as simple as one command. Using ctrl+d, it doesn't even require a terminal, I just enter it into the 'command bar' (basically like an always-open browser address bar but for commands on i3). I also do scrot -s to save images sometimes if I don't want the whole page, but that takes slightly longer. With scrot (no arg) I get the whole page instantly, with scrot -s I have to draw a box around the part I want to save. About 90% of the time scrot (for screenshot) - then open terminal, rename file - is good enough and takes on the order of 15 seconds. It's already very lean, and I don't think I can abstract away the naming part, which is where most of the time goes anyway. If I wanted to save time I could just not rename the screenshot and keep the name as basically a timestamp, but then I don't know the image's contents. I did actually try using OCR, which kinda worked, but not as well as renaming, which succinctly gets my point across better than OCR's verbosity. Bottom line, if I want to remember a browser screenshot, it's worth 10 seconds of my time to explain why through a descriptive filename. I save <10 images daily so I can spare that. I should say I've had no issues using scrot: works 100% of the time so far, faithfully getting what's on my screen. If I did have glitch issues I might search for an alternative - but I haven't had any so far.
howtofly 3y ago
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broodbucket 3y ago
I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?
- Izkata 3y ago
  I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable: * Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth) * Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable. I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >I use them instead of bookmarks. This. The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.
    - fassssst 3y ago
      But why?
      - evanjrowley 3y ago
        I'll try to articulate this as someone who usually has 500-1000 open tabs. Bookmarks are things that meet or surpass a certain threshold of usefulness. My open tabs probably include things that should be bookmarked, but all of that information needs to be screened for what's really worth saving. Clusters of tabs for various trains of thought take time to condense into purified bookmarks. In order for me to have less tabs open, I guess reality would need to become much more boring. Ironically, as I'm browsing the web, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. are all maintaining various growing data structures about me that encapsulate key information, like what content is the most engaging for me, my social graph, or tracking the sites I visit most. People act like having 1000 tabs is a problem, but no one cares when Google's database gets it's 100,000th record for the data they're keeping on you. I wish that raw data could be shared with the respective users. It would be nice to know more about my digital self than the algorithms do. It's another facet of what makes these tech companies god-like.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
> "no one wants to run an app in a tab. no one at all" what? I'm completely fine having a number of tabs running "apps", every day, for decades now. It's no different than apps in the system tray.
cc101 3y ago
[flagged]
evanjrowley 3y ago
The Settle Your Tabs part towards the end really spoke to me.
tony-allan 3y ago
I have lots of tabs open in a dozen windows in 8 MacOS desktops. Each window is current project focussed + Mail, News and Entertainment. I work my 16GB of RAM very hard with many bloated web pages. I don't like the environment much but I care about the time to context switch between projects (with text, email, and phone interrupts). I also find the sign-in process to be very broken and an attempt to reduce the sign-in time is my major issue. It is a lot worse with many 2FA authorisation schemes — TOTP, email, text message, open this or that app on my phone. If the time to open a new tab (including the sign-in process) was 50ms then I would have one window and use some mechanism to open a set of tags. Perhaps a tab group suspend function that frees up resources and securely saves authentication state and context information?
cobertos 3y ago
Tabs wouldn't be so bad if there was a unified tabular interface for all windows/tab-likes. And I'm not taking about a "your Chrome tabs are just apps in your quick switch menu" like on Android. I'm talking like every program has deep linkable content, and one set of vertical tabs (left side of screen?) for the whole OS that each point to that deep linked content. Sublime text tabs, Krita tabs, those few apps that refuse to tab, those few apps that refuse to open multiple instances, all your OS "windows" in one place.
cobertos 3y ago
The author defers a lot to their "fixing search" article[0] for arguments and numbers. That article wrongly assumes that search (and the other problems mentioned, like social) is simple to rebuild to avoid misaligned incentives by relegating it to "just" an API. A search company would still have to implement crawling, recrawling (efficiently, timely for topical events), spam filtering, ranking without being game-able, and a ton of other subtleties (robots.txt, many ways of tagging, stale content for certain categories). It also doesn't solve the underlying non-UI misaligned incentives of not injecting ads directly into the API results or however. Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely. [0]: https://berjon.com/fixing-search/ https://berjon.com/fixing-search/
JohnFen 3y ago
Personally, I want my browser to do less, not more.

92 points by meandave 3y ago

I’m not sure exactly what the proposal is, but a server in ever web browser so you could host, like, a little tiny social media and file sharing site could be nice.

makeitdouble 3y ago
But then wouldn't you want to sync it between your devices ? Wouldn't it be nice if your tiny social media site was available while you're on vacation at the beach ? Would be also convenient to have it in some place with a cheap and plentiful internet connection ?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I’m sure it could be hosted on my phone. Bandwidth-wise, it should be fine to host over the cellphone network, I’m not very interesting, I’m sure I’d only get one or two visitors a week.
theamk 3y ago
Opera tried this in 2009 (as article briefly mentions), it was called Opera Unite: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands... Almost no one used it back then, and it would be even fewer people now. After all, the time of always-on machine which can act as a server "for free" are gone. Even desktops sleep nowdays when not used, and no one would be crazy enough to kill their cellphone/tablet battery to run something that can be served by cloud faster, more reliably and often for free.
keepamovin 3y ago
My product, DownloadNet, merges server capabilities with web browsing, creating an offline search engine from your browsing history. This article echoes the innovation we're driving forward, despite this article's occasionally exaggerated and insensitive tone. Berjon, points out that despite being a cornerstone of the web, browser design has stagnated, suggesting we re-envision browsers to enhance user control. He argues for integrating browsing, search, and social media, and imagines browsers as 'agents' with server-like functions, offering services like personalized data management. Berjon also critiques tab management and the current browser business models, advocating for reinvestment into the web. He's hopeful for change, emphasizing financial incentives for innovation. Particularly intriguing is the concept of Personal Data Servers, aligning with my vision for a federated search engine in DownloadNet, which could evolve into a social sharing tool where you publish your local search engine for others to use: https://github.com/dosyago/DownloadNet https://github.com/dosyago/DownloadNet Notably missing is the role AI could play in amplifying user agency within this framework. At my company, we're crafting BrowserBox to redefine browsers as empowering user agents. It’s an open-source initiative critical to the web’s future: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

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mapt 3y ago

> Technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate. But the product view beats the architectural view every time. The question isn't "should we or should we not bundle these concerns?" but rather "given that these concerns are bundled up in actual real-world use and perception anyway, what underlying design can we come up with so that the resulting architecture makes sense?" Visceral reaction: Outside of FLOSS, technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate because bundling them is often the first step to an over-aggressive capitalism entirely consuming their utility. The "Feed" that eventually becomes a heavy advertising venue or even a brainwashing tactic, has destroyed Twitter, and Facebook, and others as user experiences, rendered things like Youtube into potent infohazards, become a foundation for post-free-speech worlds in which the Platform is expected to Moderate Content for rightthink because the Platform is (for the sake of engagement!) deciding what to show you in an Editorial Capacity. The corruption of Google Search, or the Amazon review functionality, or then the Amazon search functionality, is a major short-term loss for human agency at least as big as the writer envisions, and it's being done because bundling different concerns provides an opening, gives the corporate board an erection during quarterly P&L briefings. Over the Possibilities. If you care about the user experience, consider how long my grandfather's wrench was permitted to remain a wrench, rather than autonomously transforming into a screwdriver, or a brick, or a nice welcoming block of cheese, or a magazine subscription, or a bonfire, or Ebola. The owning entity only has to learn how to use the wrench once a generation; The interface does not drastically change to combine my love life, my choice in cereal, and my ability to tighten bolts. I have to re-learn some online tools once per YEAR because somebody is bundling something in a way that is in the short term slightly more profitable. I have a closet full of useful tools that don't exist on my cognitive plane any more and I'm not sure I want to investigate deeply enough to figure out what cosmic horror they became. In order to preserve my agency, I need to be able to flip back and forth between those tools and summon up capacities that I have not engaged in for several years; The state of web applications (and by extension, the browser) makes me as a tool-using ape feel like I have dementia with the number of holes that now exist in my knowledge versus my past self. You don't need a bigger browser. You need a predictable environment that you can buy and own, that doesn't tear itself to shreds when you're not actively handing it a geometrically larger amount of money every five minutes. Most layering violations (outside of FLOSS) that you observe are trying to pick your pocket with one hand and scramble your neocortex ("The way you THOUGHT that the platform worked") with an icepick with the other. No, my use of tabs may not be Technically Optimal. It is a way of organizing information. But it's predictable, and it's within my cognitive grasp, and it lets me do a great many things without entirely losing track of them. I don't want to have to relearn an entire means of organizing my information because you thought that my tabs belonged in your bookmark service†, or in your AI personal assistant†, or that they should be tidy and Bring You Joy. I don't want somebody to rearrange the papers on my desk; That would be profoundly disturbing because it breaks the model for how I think, how I predict things, and how I remain effective. †Which you DEFINITELY will refrain from charging a subscription for. For a year, maybe even two, before seizing that chunk of my exocortex.

Mistletoe 3y ago

If I had to guess, Google will only change Chrome in ways that make it more money. Browsers could do all kinds of awesome things but Google isn’t going to do any of it if it interferes with sending people to ads. It would be kind of nice if the majority browser wasn’t owned by the people selling you ads.

greenyoda 3y ago
I agree, but nobody is forced to use Chrome. If Firefox (which I use) were to implement some really useful features that Chrome didn't have, maybe more people would start using it. Chrome may be the default browser on Android, but Firefox is as easy to install as any other app in the Play Store.
- Ayesh 3y ago
  As browsers have reached the feature plateau, I still like the pace Firefox is innovating. I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace. Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".
zx8080 3y ago
Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads. DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now. It's actually very clever: once banks start blocking non-DRM browsers, that's a game over for all opensource and competing projects. The browser (and therefore the internet for most of the population) will then be controlled by the largest ads corporation in the history. Sad, but this kind of an entrenching seem to go very quick and very well in the mobile land (see second part of the comment [0]). 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38124214

Aerbil313 3y ago

This actually makes sense… Why isn’t Mozilla rolling out ad tracking to Firefox for it to fund itself? Oh yeah, they’re already getting all the money they need from Google.

autoexec 3y ago
I assume the real answer is that because the moment they did there'd be a thousand forks and nobody would use Mozilla's browser anymore Updates would probably slow down a lot, but I doubt that everyone would stop working on it, and that nobody new would step up to maintain whatever the most popular folks were.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  Your comment is assuming that people don’t get funding through ads for nonprofit open source projects is a good idea. Which they may not.

eduction 3y ago

What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms? This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.

idle_zealot 3y ago
What he's actually proposing are Web Tiles[1], which he explains in the next article in this series. Basically a move from web pages as Internet-connected applications to being locally-cached reusable components that compose into workflows. 1: https://berjon.com/web-tiles/ https://berjon.com/web-tiles/
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Someone should write an article about that then because this series of articles does a poor job of explaining both the problem and the solution.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Even the linked page doesn't contain the phrase "web tiles" outside of the title and a link back to itself
    - ArabicBaklava 3y ago
      i tried chatgpt prompts, still not getting much out of it either
b33j0r 3y ago
I agree. These ideas are poetry, based on our jazz standards and hymns. I disagree with “a good book is one that confirms what you already believe,” even if Willy Wonka writes it.
keepamovin 3y ago

DennisP 3y ago

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

agg23 3y ago
If you're a Mac user, Arc Browser does exactly that, at a configurable time interval. I have too many long running projects, so I don't like Arc for precisely that reason (and the vertical tab display doesn't scale well when mobile).
- charlie0 3y ago
  I've been using it for a while, but it's a free product, so I can't help but wonder what kind of data they are siphoning off me to sell. Of course, Chrome does that as well, but it's a mega company and I trust them from a security perspective more than Arc.
clouddrover 3y ago
> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable. Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  The usability of bookmarks is far worse than that of tabs. With tabs, I can just middle click in the relevant window and the tab will be in the right place, waiting for me. With bookmarks I have to either spend a lot of effort putting the bookmark into the right folder, or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks. And I'd have to remove the bookmarks once I'm done with them. And as someone who opens up hundreds of tabs and returns to many of them only several months later, bookmarks serve a different purpose in my workflow than tabs. Tabs are single-use; I close them after I consume the content in the tab and never open them again. Bookmarks are reusable, pages which I may want to return to multiple times.

julianeon 3y ago

Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes. I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen. In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them. Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed. The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a window has been at the tab limit for a couple days and wasn't compelling enough for me to act on before, I'll close all its tabs. If I didn't take notes about it or process it in some way, too late, gone now. I actually do take screenshots of some of my tabs, full page screenshots, which I think in practice is my 'bookmarking' system. I title the file with what it's about - say, "shadcdn.png". Now it's 'saved', in theory anyway for me to look at at some undefined future date (no hurry). That's my system, which works well enough.

inhumantsar 3y ago
Wouldn't PDFs be a better way to save them? Full page screenshots glitch out me about half the time, esp sites that use js to muck with scrolling
- julianeon 3y ago
  This is pretty tightly tied to my particular setup on Ubuntu, using scrot to screenshot and feh to view images and the terminal to rename them, but here's the issues I'd have w PDFs... The biggest problem is that sounds more verbose. I'd be saving the page as a PDF, but then I'd have to hunt more to find out why I saved it, since save as PDF often extends beyond one page iirc. Really one page of screenshot is plenty for my needs. Also PDF's are a lot "heavier" than images. I can scroll through 50 images in a minute, using feh. I don't know how I'd go through multiple PDF's actually, but in any case I imagine in the best case scenario it's still slower. The effort of loading 10 PDFs would deter me from doing it as often, I think. Finally, using scrot to get the screenshot, it's as simple as one command. Using ctrl+d, it doesn't even require a terminal, I just enter it into the 'command bar' (basically like an always-open browser address bar but for commands on i3). I also do scrot -s to save images sometimes if I don't want the whole page, but that takes slightly longer. With scrot (no arg) I get the whole page instantly, with scrot -s I have to draw a box around the part I want to save. About 90% of the time scrot (for screenshot) - then open terminal, rename file - is good enough and takes on the order of 15 seconds. It's already very lean, and I don't think I can abstract away the naming part, which is where most of the time goes anyway. If I wanted to save time I could just not rename the screenshot and keep the name as basically a timestamp, but then I don't know the image's contents. I did actually try using OCR, which kinda worked, but not as well as renaming, which succinctly gets my point across better than OCR's verbosity. Bottom line, if I want to remember a browser screenshot, it's worth 10 seconds of my time to explain why through a descriptive filename. I save <10 images daily so I can spare that. I should say I've had no issues using scrot: works 100% of the time so far, faithfully getting what's on my screen. If I did have glitch issues I might search for an alternative - but I haven't had any so far.

howtofly 3y ago

[dead]

broodbucket 3y ago

I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?

Izkata 3y ago
I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable: * Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth) * Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable. I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >I use them instead of bookmarks. This. The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.
  - fassssst 3y ago
    But why?
    - evanjrowley 3y ago
      I'll try to articulate this as someone who usually has 500-1000 open tabs. Bookmarks are things that meet or surpass a certain threshold of usefulness. My open tabs probably include things that should be bookmarked, but all of that information needs to be screened for what's really worth saving. Clusters of tabs for various trains of thought take time to condense into purified bookmarks. In order for me to have less tabs open, I guess reality would need to become much more boring. Ironically, as I'm browsing the web, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. are all maintaining various growing data structures about me that encapsulate key information, like what content is the most engaging for me, my social graph, or tracking the sites I visit most. People act like having 1000 tabs is a problem, but no one cares when Google's database gets it's 100,000th record for the data they're keeping on you. I wish that raw data could be shared with the respective users. It would be nice to know more about my digital self than the algorithms do. It's another facet of what makes these tech companies god-like.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

> "no one wants to run an app in a tab. no one at all" what? I'm completely fine having a number of tabs running "apps", every day, for decades now. It's no different than apps in the system tray.

cc101 3y ago

[flagged]

evanjrowley 3y ago

The Settle Your Tabs part towards the end really spoke to me.

tony-allan 3y ago

I have lots of tabs open in a dozen windows in 8 MacOS desktops. Each window is current project focussed + Mail, News and Entertainment. I work my 16GB of RAM very hard with many bloated web pages. I don't like the environment much but I care about the time to context switch between projects (with text, email, and phone interrupts). I also find the sign-in process to be very broken and an attempt to reduce the sign-in time is my major issue. It is a lot worse with many 2FA authorisation schemes — TOTP, email, text message, open this or that app on my phone. If the time to open a new tab (including the sign-in process) was 50ms then I would have one window and use some mechanism to open a set of tags. Perhaps a tab group suspend function that frees up resources and securely saves authentication state and context information?

cobertos 3y ago

Tabs wouldn't be so bad if there was a unified tabular interface for all windows/tab-likes. And I'm not taking about a "your Chrome tabs are just apps in your quick switch menu" like on Android. I'm talking like every program has deep linkable content, and one set of vertical tabs (left side of screen?) for the whole OS that each point to that deep linked content. Sublime text tabs, Krita tabs, those few apps that refuse to tab, those few apps that refuse to open multiple instances, all your OS "windows" in one place.

cobertos 3y ago

The author defers a lot to their "fixing search" article[0] for arguments and numbers. That article wrongly assumes that search (and the other problems mentioned, like social) is simple to rebuild to avoid misaligned incentives by relegating it to "just" an API. A search company would still have to implement crawling, recrawling (efficiently, timely for topical events), spam filtering, ranking without being game-able, and a ton of other subtleties (robots.txt, many ways of tagging, stale content for certain categories). It also doesn't solve the underlying non-UI misaligned incentives of not injecting ads directly into the API results or however. Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely. [0]: https://berjon.com/fixing-search/ https://berjon.com/fixing-search/

JohnFen 3y ago

Personally, I want my browser to do less, not more.