You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

by meandave • 3 years ago

92 93 3 years ago

mapt• 3 years 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.

syntheweave• 3 years ago

The article is making the case for unbundling the authoring experience by bundling the browser and making it an owned environment. And that could be a win.

Mistletoe• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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".

zx80802• 3 years 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

skybrian• 3 years ago

I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things? On mobile, some people even use apps that only interact with one bank. Or an app just for YouTube.

(I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.)

A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.

Aerbil3132• 3 years 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.

autoexec2• 3 years 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.

Aerbil3132• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/

CSMastermind• 3 years 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.

b33j0r• 3 years 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.

keepamovin4• 3 years ago

This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee.

This reading seems too dismissive and simplistic, and not respectful of the people involved. At the base of the article:

Many thanks to the following excellent people (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable feedback: Amy Guy, Benjamin Goering, Ben Harnett, Blaine Cook, Boris Mann, Brian Kardell, Brooklyn Zelenka, Dave Justice, Dietrich Ayala, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Fabrice Desré, Ian Preston, Juan Caballero, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Marcin Rataj, Margaux Vitre, Maria Farrell, and Tess O'Connor. Needless to say, anything dumb and stupid in this article is entirely mine.

Is there a specific point you found circular or hand-wavy?

btilly• 3 years ago

The point that nobody wants tabs was handwavy and extremely dismissive of the fact that I actually do like tabs.

Based on my past experiences with other UX people who want me to live without a UI element that I'm attached to, I'd be willing to bet money that he's failed to understand something about how my brain actually works. And mocking people who might have my preference goes a long way to convincing me that he won't want to listen to why people like me don't want to use his version. Whatever it is. (He didn't make that clear.)

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

That was my question as well. But perhaps he intended it as a statement of principles rather than a formal recommendation.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Sometimes it's ok to have a think-piece that makes you think. It doesn't all need to be answers.

bee_rider2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_rider2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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...

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.

keepamovin4• 3 years 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

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

DennisP3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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).

charlie03• 3 years 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.

clouddrover4• 3 years 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".

mostlylurks3• 3 years 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.

dspillett• 3 years ago

They should call this feature "bookmarks".

Keeping a tab open includes history in what is saved, which can be quite significant (if that tab was not opened as a fresh tab so has no history), a simple bookmark does not.

People here are suggesting storing more than that, not less, including the DOM so it's content can be searched later.

DennisP3• 3 years ago

It's silly to require manual intervention for something so easy to automate. For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs, bookmarks aren't that helpful.

I can't resist quoting the article:

(If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)

ff2400t• 3 years ago

Firefox on Android have options for those. You can configure when tabs get automatically closed, and tabs get automatically moved to an Inactive section after two weeks of not opening them.

charlie03• 3 years ago

Searching history almost never works for me.

1. The page titles don't often align with my search terms. 2. Most of the history is clutter of Google searches and other noisy stuff I don't care about (as you've mentioned).

To that end, I've been using readwise or raindrop to great effect. I can save the pages I really care about and then organize them as needed. I don't really believe in the whole "I need 100's of tabs open" model, get some help y'all.

schiffern• 3 years ago

Sounds like serializing the entire tab state (DOM, JS, form inputs, etc) for instant resume, plus indexing text for instant search.

Imagine being able to resume a complex web-app, complete with input form text and the entire application state. A huge limitation of most browser suspend/resume implementations is that they often cause data loss.

We've all had the experience of letting a tab get too "stale" and suddenly it drops you back to the main page or the (dreaded) empty form. This mistrust becomes a constant mental burden, often forcing you to unnaturally twist your workflow due to fear of getting burned again. Yuck.

julianeon3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

julianeon3• 3 years 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.

SkyArrow• 3 years ago

PDFs are ok but I prefer the SingleFile extension which has the benefit of not introducing page breaks which often split images in two. It also preserves the original source and assets in case one ever needs to extract them.

caryme• 3 years ago

This matches my usage pattern and I use the term "tab bankruptcy." Twinsies!

julianeon3• 3 years ago

Great taste my friend! Once you get used to it, it's hard to imagine anything better.

broodbucket• 3 years 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?

Izkata4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

ksec• 3 years ago

On HN, I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs ( I am not making this shit up ). And it was from a pre 2013 Account.

So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.

As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.

Given_473• 3 years ago

I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs

Yea that's nothing, haha. I currently have 3592 open. Like you mention, research and tab hoarding go hand in hand. Even recreational research: everyone is familiar with the wikipedia spree with its innumerable hyperlinked articles and references, and now you suddenly have 20 additional open tabs. I'll read maybe two of them, but the others piqued my interest enough to warrant opening, so definitely not closing them. If you never purge, you eventually end up in the hundreds/thousands.

My tabs get auto suspended when they've been idle for thirty mins, which prevents the memory usage from becoming ridiculous enough to incentivize me to change! Though I do need a better system, such as a tagging/categorization system for links. At least half my open tabs are things not of immediate relevance (duh), but HN posts/random blog posts on $NICHE_TOPIC that I'll (hopefully) get to eventually; eg building a DIY keyboard. Especially the blog posts, I can't be sure that I'll stumble upon them again. Sites like MakeUseOf can fuck off, they always float to the top of the SERP.

13of40• 3 years ago

Simple: Events come in, like emails, chats, bug reports, etc. They have URLs in them. I click the URL, bringing another tab into the world. Half the time I forget to close the tab. Sometimes the browser windows breed when I drag two tabs out to view them side by side. Days later I realize I can't keep track anymore and I run a script that kills *edge*,*chrome*.

radlad• 3 years ago

For example, I load Hacker News, scan all the headlines and ctrl-click anything that looks interesting, plus the comments section.

I use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through them. I might ctrl-click additional links in the article or comment section to browse through when I'm finished reading.

If I'm interrupted, I'll open a new tab, or a new window if there's too many (I prefer 10 or less, since you can then use ctrl-# to jump between them.) Eventually, if I've given up on them, I'll close a bunch in one go. Or I'll just close a whole window because I haven't looked at in a while.

Easy come, easy go.

wenc2• 3 years ago

I open tons of tabs but they rarely stay open.

I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read, but my tab counts rarely exceed 20. I read those articles/comments, and I Cmd-W to close them. At the end of the day I end up with 0 tabs, and close the browser.

Even when I'm in the middle of doing research, I open a ton of tabs, save the promising ones as bookmarks in a folder, and close the rest. I take my cue from that scene in Ratatouille where the chef says "keep your stations clear" [1]. I try not clutter my tab bar with irrelevant tabs so my attention is not divided.

I've seen people who open 100s of tabs, and they do what I do except they never close tabs. To me that seems to be a sign of a cluttered mind, but it's the same kind of mind that is able to find objects in a messy room, so who am I to judge? Whatever works I guess.

The risk of not closing/bookmarking tabs is that you're one Cmd-Q or system hang away from losing all your tabs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgiK-HWKPjw

extra88• 3 years ago

I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read

That's what RSS is for.

cole-k2• 3 years ago

Many tab user (~20-50?) reporting in.

I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet. e.g. I've had a tab group for a while for buying new shoes. Really, most of these tabs should be bookmarks, but I'm just not bothered enough to change it (yet).

Interspersed among the FOMO tabs are things I'm currently working on. These are strewn all over the place and I've observed two things about how I use them. First, when I try to prune work tabs I am always overzealous and I find myself reopening the same tabs over and over. Second, I'm sensitive to where tabs are located spatially and I'm able to frequently find my way back to oldish tabs.

So basically, I'm saying "I have a system," but that is a flimsy defense and the real answer is probably "I'm not bothered enough to change."

keepamovin4• 3 years ago

I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet

Ha! Like a tab succubus

CodesInChaos2• 3 years ago

I can recommend the one-tab extension for people with tab-FOMO. It closes all tabs, but saves their urls (never to be looked at again).

sekh60• 3 years ago

I almost never have more than one browser window open and I think the most tabs I have ever had open was 7.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

You're not the only one. I very rarely have more than two or three.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years 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.

evanjrowley5• 3 years ago

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

tony-allan• 3 years 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?

cobertos3• 3 years 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.

cobertos3• 3 years 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/

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

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

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

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