What special features would you like in a browser

[greenlake]

[darmstadt]

Or Lynx or for real computers, Charlotte

[NickFitz]

How about a browser that just lets you browse.

No annoying adverts, pop-ups, auto start video, video panes that follow you as you scroll down the page, UI designed by the bearded tatooed orange tanned generation of pretentious 'look at me, look at me' s, web pages so bloated they require a fibre connection to load quickly, pre-loading millions of crappy scripts in the background trying to make their tulipty website behave like an app ... it's a ******* web browser, if I wanted an app I'd download an app.

There's too many geeks bloating the crap out of browsers and websites and doing it badly. Can't they all sod off and do a cryptocoin ICO* or something and let the software stay fit for purpose.

* One that does away with needing advertisement revenue, sites can coin it in with virtual tokens donated by readers that think the content is worth micropaying for. It's not difficult. If I wasn't so lazy I'd have tulip loads of these ICOs as plan Bs.

Download a 1990s-vintage copy of Netscape Navigator - there's virtually no modern JavaScript that will run successfully on version 2 and it also doesn't support more recent HTML tags such as <div> and <span>, so after dismissing a few dozen error alerts you'll be able to marvel at how bad they are at structuring their HTML too

[Hobosapien]

How about a browser that just lets you browse.

No annoying adverts, pop-ups, auto start video, video panes that follow you as you scroll down the page, UI designed by the bearded tatooed orange tanned generation of pretentious 'look at me, look at me' s, web pages so bloated they require a fibre connection to load quickly, pre-loading millions of crappy scripts in the background trying to make their tulipty website behave like an app ... it's a ******* web browser, if I wanted an app I'd download an app.

There's too many geeks bloating the crap out of browsers and websites and doing it badly. Can't they all sod off and do a cryptocoin ICO* or something and let the software stay fit for purpose.

* One that does away with needing advertisement revenue, sites can coin it in with virtual tokens donated by readers that think the content is worth micropaying for. It's not difficult. If I wasn't so lazy I'd have tulip loads of these ICOs as plan Bs.

[shaunbhoy]

[NickFitz]

Modern browsers also now support the Page Visibility API, which allows scripts to know when the user switches to/from another tab or minimises/maximises the browser window, so the savvy developer can build their site so it stops using resources when the user isn't looking at it.

Good luck getting all the resource suckers on, say, a local newspaper website to update their code to take advantage of this, though

[FrontEnder]

(That title was supposed to read "special features .." DOH! )

I'd like the ability to:

1. At the press of a button, completely suspend processing of a page, i.e. stop javascript running & videos playing, etc, and perhaps even link buttons working. (Why on Earth doesn't this happen anyway when the page is not visible? )

Because people often leave things running in non visible tabs, it's one of the reasons why tabbed browsers were invented in the first place.

Granted, the option to opt in/out of that would be nice. I'd guess there's almost certainly a plugin that can do that.

[NickFitz]

Safari now also does the thing of mucking up the cookies so you don't get followed forever by ads for things you looked at on some unrelated website months ago, which has hugely pissed off marketing types

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...browser-safari <- link to the Guardian just to annoy OH, who hates it
https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelli...ng-prevention/ <- actually useful link to the technical details of the feature

[barrydidit]

Like Safari you mean....

P'raps. I wouldn't have suggested it if I knew it already existed though Weekend research beckons

[stek]

A button which switched to private mode and loaded some pron would be helpful.

In fact, if that were the only button, it would be even better.

Like Safari you mean....

[barrydidit]

A button which switched to private mode and loaded some pron would be helpful.

In fact, if that were the only button, it would be even better.

[OwlHoot]

(That title was supposed to read "special features .." DOH! ) Mod edit: it does now

I'd like the ability to:

1. At the press of a button, completely suspend processing of a page, i.e. stop javascript running & videos playing, etc, and perhaps even link buttons working. (Why on Earth doesn't this happen anyway when the page is not visible? )

But it is extremely vexing the way newspaper pages, such as the Daily Mail and Telegraph (doubtless all of them actually), refresh their front page automatically after a few minutes, so one loses one's place and often all the items are reordered.

2. Provide a load of fixed dummy fake data in cookies. (It's creepy the way sites start advertising things I've been looking at on other sites! )