Improving your favorite web browser.

sgunhouse

I'm presuming you know that did work in the Windows panel of Opera Presto. No idea if any of the tab-related extensions for either Opera 23 or Chrome can do this.

QuHno

yepp, I knew that, I use the panels every day - but why not improve it and apply the same rules to the tabs themselves?

QuHno

A decent backup system that keeps some kind of "rotating" backup of the last 4 or 5 sessions - that way you can switch to an older session if something goes wrong.
Especially important if you do not just use a dumb browser but a complete suite.

It does not need to be built in, but it should integrate nicely into the browser's UI if it is present.

Reason: Today I shredded yesterdays session (my fault) and I was very happy that I do daily backups (the command line / batch is still my friend :D). the only thing I miss with those is an integrity check.

christian

What I have come to demand from a web browser is synced password manager. I use Lastpass. However, I wish that I could find a browser that had a built in feature rich password manager that we cross platform and synced. In fact, LastPass is the only browser plugin I feel I can't live without unless a browser comes along with something similar built in.

QuHno

Had a nice talk with another guy who misses something like an improved Unite - with the option to not only work P2P but with a local central server too (may be something nodeJS based?). He thought that this, in combination with some (existing open source) time-tracking/ticket/calendar etc. software could be a very good replacement for some of the bigger (completely overblown and expensive) commercial suites for small businesses - targeting especially those companies who don't want to or can not use the cloud for various reasons.

I personally thing this is a great idea. I think many people would love it, if there were a browser that could attach such modules and could bring that under one nicely styled surface …

... hm ... modules ... why not a completely modular browser?
Some naked core but a bunch of nice things that can be plugged in (not to confuse with browser plug-ins but real packages, centrally maintained) ...

EricJH

I always liked and appreciated Unite because it gives freedom to end users to not use cloud solutions. It is and was a very progressive idea which was likely ahead of it's time.

Dr.Flay

For many years I used a very handy tool/plugin for Internet Explorer "Afreet Site Viewer"
I haven't tried it on Windows 7, but it still use it on XP.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021005163138/http://www.netvampire.com/SiteView/
It makes IE worth using and the easiest browser to navigate complex or badly made sites. It also makes finding the actual downloads much easier.
If you are working on a site, it can also help you visualise the structure of your monstrosity…. sorry "challenging structure".
These days may people don't have FTP access any more and have to use a seriously annoying portal system.
Mind you when you do get to access a site made with Wordpress or similar, you realise that FTP is more annoying than useful :S

When Opera got the sidebar and the ability to show the links in a clean strip down the side, I realised Opera could easily host a panel just like Site Viewer.
In fact it could easily be built in to the browser as a feature. It does not itself "do" anything, and could compare to the little tools that fetch standard Windows counters data for use in CPU, RAM and resource display.
The info needed to be displayed is simply collected from the history and cache as you browse.

OK. now lets just say that power-users or people with a preference of light or dark hats, will notice certain advantages with having the guts of a site on display, and that yes I have found plenty of files and folders I am not supposed to :evil: , so I see that perhaps it is not an ideal standard tool for the masses, but could be part of Dragonfly if it was built in.
As a plugin, well that is up to people to find it.

If a curious developer wishes for a copy, I have a genuine registered key, and the program is now abandon-ware since Afreet disappeared in 2003.

QuHno

@sgunhouse:

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 should be possible - I use LameXP for audio conversions and it simply looks up how many cores are available and restricts the load to one process per core (yes, the system could handle 2 per core, but I hardly have one program alone open in a desktop environment).

IMHO a similar approach would work for browsers too. If you look e.g. at the chromium command line switches, you can see a quite fine graded control over the number of processes, you can cut them down to 2 or 3 and it is still working (cutting to one didn't work out for obvious reasons). Additionally you can restrict all pages from one site to one process or thread, which makes sense too, because often the scripts etc are reused, there should be no need to duplicate everything.

Now there is the question how to integrate that into the UI. Fiddling with such relatively low level settings is not quite safe for the public, it can break things if you don't know what you are doing.
(Who remembers the quite harmless "fit to width"? It broke many pages because users forgot that they had switched it on. Now imagine what can happen with low level settings …)

IMHO some pre-configured and relatively save to use profiles would be a good approach, may be something like this:
[ol]

aggressively minimal resources, as few processes as possible, possibly a bit slow, possibly unstable
reduced resources, looking up some hardware data and configuring the number of processes accordingly to the number of cores, the graphics adapter etc. possibly slow on some pages, stable as far as stable goes.
reduced resources, pages normal, but extensions, plugins etc forced into one collective process (if that doesn't have security implications)
normal. which is … normal
expert mode - comes with a big warning and a "reset to normal" option. Allows manual tinkering with all the settings.
[/ol]
Then let the user decide which power setting he wants to use.

Additionally a visible indicator somewhere, that shows if you did change a setting, no matter which one it was.

Merser

To the possibility of Opera 12 it would be good to add a load tabs on demand. Improved support for modern technologies (engine becomes obsolete every day) and more powerful JS-engine. If we talk about Opera for Chromium, then it lacks settings for websites, good synchronization of data and grouping tabs.