Improving your favorite web browser.
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My setup is still strongly based on the one developed by Moose in the mid 2000s. It's not free of visible GUI because a variety of switches are included as indicators. And the menubar actually includes far more, not less functionality ordered in a more logical manner.
What is true is that e.g. the tabbar and menubar are meant to be toggled. There's often little reason to have them active.
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For me the lack on a built in e-mail client is crucial.
Same here. After moving from Opera 12 (I'm on Ubuntu Linux) to Firefox, I found an extension called SimpleMail that does pretty much the same job as the email client in Opera.
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My favourite Browser is Opera 12.16 and the only thing that can be better is to reintegrate Unite and do a better version of the IRC client and also a direct editing of the html in e-mail composer (now i can only add code but not edit it).
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OK, in my first post in this thread i didn't write how to improve a browser:
Some geeky things, one that came to my mind when I was playing around with Qupzilla (or some other Chromium derivative, don't remember exactly so please don't sue me if it was not Qupzilla):
Cutting down the referrer to the domain part. No need to know for other sites where exactly I was before. May be even better: Just send it its own address. Some sites don't like it if you deactivate the referrer completely, may be that would help.A real good content blocker. I was playing around a little bit with the Lightbeam extension for Firefox (former Collusion) and got:
"data gathered since Jan 17, 2014 – you have visited 6 sites -- you have connected with 92 third party sites"
(yeah - my router log said the same)
While the urlfilter.ini in Opera <15 is really good because it does not even fire a single request to the sites that are blocked and collapses the area with the blocked content if possible, the rule generation lacks a bit. I'd like to have a learning filter. I throw stuff at it and it tries to find the smallest common denominator that doesn't break everything - may be some Bayesian based learning - but with an undo: "OMG! This broke something too much, please make the rule a little bit less generic" ...
I personally don't care that much about the undo because I tinkered with inis almost since they started to exist, but it might be a real benefit for pure point and click users ...
While we are at blocking: Just a simple "block all 3rd party iframes or objects" button would be welcome too.The 3rd thing:
some "Make this page readable" - aka: don't give me pure black backgrounds and pure white text on it, I want my default colors which are (insert here). Furthermore the minuímum font size might look nice but it is too small for me, give me at least (insert here)px and please do some line height calculation.(I could provide a nice formula which calculates the line height based on used font size and line width. Works really well and helps the eye to find the next line. Wider lines need some more distance as do bigger font sizes.)
edit:
I just scribbled something in JS, I am sure it could be done in a better way:function calculateLineHeight(element) { var style = window.getComputedStyle(element, null).getPropertyValue('font-size'); var fontSize = parseFloat(style); // yes, it indeed can be float - parseInt should do too. var PHI = (1 + Math.sqrt(5)) / 2; var PHI1 = PHI - (1 / (2 * PHI)); var PHI2 = 2 * PHI * PHI * PHI; var lineHeight = (element.offsetWidth / (fontSize * fontSize * PHI2)) + PHI1; lineHeight = (lineHeight > 1.3) ? lineHeight : 1.3; element.style.lineHeight = lineHeight; }
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Tabstaking for blink versions if possible would save alot of space on the tab bar.
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in my favourite browser (opera 12) i would like to see something similar to chrome's IE Tab Multi extension. it allows you to open a tab as ie within chrome. more info can be found at http://iblogbox.com/chrome/ietab/alert.php. if you can forgive the horrible english, the extension is extremely handy. I would want something like that to emulate other browser as well. it seems much better than user agent switching.
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One Browser = One Process!
I often mentioned it at other places but here again: The Browser must work in one process! Especially Windows can´t handle an infinite number of processes without lagging on smaller or older machines (≤ 2GB). But Opium forces it to.
Today after a long time I tried Firefox (26.0) on my 1 GB Win7 Netbook; Man - there are worlds between in terms of speed in opposed to Opium! Firefox runs in contrast to Opium which just think two times before it opens a new tab (-process). And that only up to a certain/small number of tabs to become finally unusable. And I do not use many extensions.Damn. If even a different rendering engine, they should have taken that!
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unfortunately, Firefox is also switching to multi-process architecture
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A modern multi-core processor can handle twice as many threads as it has cores without even switching, so I wouldn't exclude multithreading completely. But … it has to recognize the resources available and handle them appropriately.
That's one thing about Presto (and I've mentioned it elsewhere) - a seriously taxing page won't freeze it. I've seen some file listings (that is to say, no javascript at all) freeze Opera 19 for several minutes, the same page loads faster in Presto and appears less of a demand on the system.
Say, something like http://mirror.dacentec.com/mageia/distrib/4/x86_64/media/core/release/ (a list of files in the new version of Mageia Linux). Okay, on my Win7 laptop neither freezes, but Presto renders the page quicker and actually allows you to scroll while it is loading. You can scroll in Opera 19 too, but at some point you run out of rendered content and see just a checkerboard. But this laptop is > 1 GB RAM, it may well freeze a system with less RAM.
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unfortunately, Firefox is also switching to multi-process architecture
Great news … :S
But why? What is the benefit? Or is it easier to program, therefore less work for the developers?
Ok - in Unix (OS X and Linux) processes are only forks, so it doesn´t matter. But not in Windows. There they cause overhead, in opposite to threads within a process, which are no problem.
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I also consider that Opera Presto was complete. The best feature would be to polish the feature sets that Opera had at versions 8-10 and make it perfectly stable, to immortalise the legend. Not going to happen, I know.
My new favourite browser is Elinks. It is console-based, but it has menus, configurable keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks (!) and it can be extended with scripts. I'm posting in it right now. It doesn't support images directly, it doesn't have Javascript (can be added) and its support for text features is only as good as the terminal under it. I actually like it this way, because this way all text has the same size and is therefore readable. In old Opera I also used to switch images off and set a custom CSS to fix all text at certain size.
I call it webpage optimiser. I wish more browsers would have such capacities.
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This is probably my #1 feature I missed when switching back to Firefox. Presto performed terribly on my PC and that finally got to me.
Otter seems promising at the moment, but still too buggy to use as a full time browser. http://otter-browser.org/
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My new favourite browser is Elinks. It is console-based, but it has menus, configurable keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks (!) and it can be extended with scripts…
…and it is anyway a nerd browser. For normal users completely irrelevant and unusable.
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My new favourite browser is Elinks. It is console-based, but it has menus, configurable keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks (!) and it can be extended with scripts…
…and it is anyway a nerd browser. For normal users completely irrelevant and unusable.
That's what the company decided about Opera too, you know: Irrelevant nerd browser, let's remove all features citing a bogus research according to which nobody uses bookmarks.
Console is perfectly usable to many people I know. When you are on *nix, you have to like console, or at least tolerate it. It's good for your eyes too, when properly configured. Console-based browsers remove the unnecessary flashiness from the web. I used Opera the same way.
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Images/animations and plugins disabled was really popular for people with old hardware or limited bandwidth - it was just about required on dial-up - and in fact is still available in Opera 19. The fancy userCSS that older versions of Opera included is not yet in the new Opera though, nor "Fit to width".
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Yesterday I found a funny (or scary) outlook on the browser of 2030:
.2030 The World's Most Popular Browser
[attachment=68]browser2030.jpg[/attachment]
Dream UI
No old-fashioned bar and button
Super sleek and cleanSource until 1. March
Attachments:
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Wouldn't surprise me in the least. The times - they are a'changin. We shouldn't expect the browsers to continue to look and act like they did in the 90's.
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But one thing you must be aware: Then they got us!
One account. All of services means:
You are the slave of those services. No free Internet for free humans. -
Maybe… but I'm not that pessimistic. There will always be some young freedom loving genius who will find a way to circumvent the establishment. The future excites me; it always has. I love to keep moving forward. The only person in my immediate circle even more zealous about that is my wife, Lin. Seriously, you should see her around technology. It's no wonder to me why her son has succeeded so well with Microsoft.
Anyway, I don't like to go in reverse and that for me would be a browser suite like Opera Presto or Netscape or the old Mozilla suite or SeaMonkey. I wNt something different... something cleaner and lighter.
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My favorite browser is almost dead.Currently searching for replacement having same features.