summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2011-07-26 08:47 pm
summercomfort) wrote2011-07-26 08:47 pm
My ideal browser
So, this is the post that I started out writing this afternoon that turned into the last post.
I often tell Jono this in bits and pieces, but I figured it's probably better to commit to paper the things that make me stay with Firefox and the things that I wish it would do.
This is a very personalized list, specific to me. I'm sure you have completely different requirements for your browser.
Before I get into it, though, I want to say that for me, it has always been about the features and the user interface of a browser. Back in 2004, when I was trying to decide between Firefox, Camino, and Safari, I realized that in terms of speed and basic browsing, all three were all "good enough" -- by then speed was more dependent on the speed of the connection and speed of your processor. So really, I made the decision based on two things: (1) Firefox, with its bottom bar and highlighting, had a much better "Find" interface, and (2) Firefox allowed me to close a tab by middle-clicking the tab, without requiring the precision of hitting the [x] of the tab. That's it. Those were the only 2 features that made me stay with Firefox back in 2004. The features I talk about now may be equally minute.
Good Session Restore. This is important because it makes me not afraid to close my browser. When I close Firefox, I know that when I re-open it, it will have the exact same tabs, each tab will still have its original browsing history, and I know it will do this FAST. This has been achieved through use of:
- Firefox Preferences --> General
- The BarTab addon, which keeps individual tabs un-loaded until you click on it. This means that when I open my browser, it's not trying to load all 30 tabs that I have open. (Actually, you can accomplish the same thing by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0 in about:config)
Good Tab Management. I don't think anyone can agree about this. Ideally, I'd like all of my tabs always visible and easily accessible. Panorama removes the visibility of some tabs, so it hasn't really done anything for me except to displacing the guilt of closing certain tabs by moving them off-screen. I think the complexity of tabs comes from the many different types of browsing I do on an average day:
- There are the tabs that I always have open, which AppTabs addresses.
- Then there's the "Casual Browsing", where I open some links, read them, then close them. For that, the current tab system works pretty well: I middle-click a bunch of links, scroll to the end (most recently opened tab), and then read-and-close until I'm back to the original tab.
- Then there's "Tabs as Reminders to Do Stuff," where I keep a tab open so that I can email someone about it, or add it to a powerpoint, etc. For that I wish it could be separated into a separate window or some sort of "Tab To-Do List" that I can then work from, perhaps with even some sort of priority marking system -- the brighter the tab, the more I need to take care of it. Or I can select some tabs and tag it with some category that will help me find them.
- Then there's the "Research" browsing, where I'm doing a bajillion searches and opening a bajillion potential documents and closing them just as rapidly as I narrow down my search. In those cases, I really wish I could view the tabs in a tree format that shows which tabs were opened from which other tabs. That way I can close, for example, all the tabs that came from a search for "Ethiopian Food San Jose" when friends suddenly decide to go out for Thai or something. It'd be nice in those situations if I could also do side-by-side tab compare.
Basically, I like the current tab system for most things, but wish there was a way to open into "advanced tab tree browsing" when I'm researching, and a way to select and tag multiple tabs. And with the selected tabs, the ability to move them to a new window, or to bookmark all of them, or to copy all of the URLs into the clipboard or something. Is there a browser that allows you to select and manipulate multiple tabs?
Sync. Man, talk about wasted potential here. FF allows you to sync your bookmarks and history and tabs across different computers, which is cool. But two things: (1) The access to these bookmarks and tabs is so well-hidden in menus that I never click on, that I never remember that I have my tabs synced. And (2) For me it's more important to sync up my add-ons and browser versions so that I have a uniform experience when using the browser. I'm fine with pressing some "sync" button and waiting while the right versions of stuff downloaded, but since my FF is customized with addons, I'd like the same addons to be set up the same way on all my FFs.
Profile Toggle. I wish there were an easier way to toggle between profiles, without restarting the browser or opening a new window or clearing existing tabs, or whatever (that can be an option, but not required). Private Browsing is good for when you don't want the browser to remember where you've been, but often I do, just in specific contexts. For example, I'd love to have "school" vs. "goofing off" vs. "student" profiles that I can toggle between on my school laptop. When I'm using it for school, I use the school profile, which keeps me on the straight and narrow. When I want to check my webcomics at home, I use the "goofing off" profile, and when a student wants to use it, I set it to the "student" profile. This should totally be a little button on the bottom right or something.
Task Manager for the Browser. Once when I complained to Jono that FF was acting up, he said, "try turning off your add-ons and then turning them back on one at a time." Given that the issue would only arise on odd days while watching videos of b-boys, and given that I have about 10 add-ons, this would have taken me 10 weeks to figure out. Since I do so many things on the browser that it's akin to its own operating system, I really wish there was some sort of Task Manager equivalent where I can see whether it's a tab or an add-on that's acting up, and close exclusively that tab/add-on.
Hmm.... that's it for now. I guess I will finish by asking myself the question, "What is it, in 2011, that is keeping me with Firefox?" The answer: Session Restore, Awesome Bar, and my two download-related add-ons: Download Status Bar, and Video DownloadHelper.
I often tell Jono this in bits and pieces, but I figured it's probably better to commit to paper the things that make me stay with Firefox and the things that I wish it would do.
This is a very personalized list, specific to me. I'm sure you have completely different requirements for your browser.
Before I get into it, though, I want to say that for me, it has always been about the features and the user interface of a browser. Back in 2004, when I was trying to decide between Firefox, Camino, and Safari, I realized that in terms of speed and basic browsing, all three were all "good enough" -- by then speed was more dependent on the speed of the connection and speed of your processor. So really, I made the decision based on two things: (1) Firefox, with its bottom bar and highlighting, had a much better "Find" interface, and (2) Firefox allowed me to close a tab by middle-clicking the tab, without requiring the precision of hitting the [x] of the tab. That's it. Those were the only 2 features that made me stay with Firefox back in 2004. The features I talk about now may be equally minute.
Good Session Restore. This is important because it makes me not afraid to close my browser. When I close Firefox, I know that when I re-open it, it will have the exact same tabs, each tab will still have its original browsing history, and I know it will do this FAST. This has been achieved through use of:
- Firefox Preferences --> General
- The BarTab addon, which keeps individual tabs un-loaded until you click on it. This means that when I open my browser, it's not trying to load all 30 tabs that I have open. (Actually, you can accomplish the same thing by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0 in about:config)
Good Tab Management. I don't think anyone can agree about this. Ideally, I'd like all of my tabs always visible and easily accessible. Panorama removes the visibility of some tabs, so it hasn't really done anything for me except to displacing the guilt of closing certain tabs by moving them off-screen. I think the complexity of tabs comes from the many different types of browsing I do on an average day:
- There are the tabs that I always have open, which AppTabs addresses.
- Then there's the "Casual Browsing", where I open some links, read them, then close them. For that, the current tab system works pretty well: I middle-click a bunch of links, scroll to the end (most recently opened tab), and then read-and-close until I'm back to the original tab.
- Then there's "Tabs as Reminders to Do Stuff," where I keep a tab open so that I can email someone about it, or add it to a powerpoint, etc. For that I wish it could be separated into a separate window or some sort of "Tab To-Do List" that I can then work from, perhaps with even some sort of priority marking system -- the brighter the tab, the more I need to take care of it. Or I can select some tabs and tag it with some category that will help me find them.
- Then there's the "Research" browsing, where I'm doing a bajillion searches and opening a bajillion potential documents and closing them just as rapidly as I narrow down my search. In those cases, I really wish I could view the tabs in a tree format that shows which tabs were opened from which other tabs. That way I can close, for example, all the tabs that came from a search for "Ethiopian Food San Jose" when friends suddenly decide to go out for Thai or something. It'd be nice in those situations if I could also do side-by-side tab compare.
Basically, I like the current tab system for most things, but wish there was a way to open into "advanced tab tree browsing" when I'm researching, and a way to select and tag multiple tabs. And with the selected tabs, the ability to move them to a new window, or to bookmark all of them, or to copy all of the URLs into the clipboard or something. Is there a browser that allows you to select and manipulate multiple tabs?
Sync. Man, talk about wasted potential here. FF allows you to sync your bookmarks and history and tabs across different computers, which is cool. But two things: (1) The access to these bookmarks and tabs is so well-hidden in menus that I never click on, that I never remember that I have my tabs synced. And (2) For me it's more important to sync up my add-ons and browser versions so that I have a uniform experience when using the browser. I'm fine with pressing some "sync" button and waiting while the right versions of stuff downloaded, but since my FF is customized with addons, I'd like the same addons to be set up the same way on all my FFs.
Profile Toggle. I wish there were an easier way to toggle between profiles, without restarting the browser or opening a new window or clearing existing tabs, or whatever (that can be an option, but not required). Private Browsing is good for when you don't want the browser to remember where you've been, but often I do, just in specific contexts. For example, I'd love to have "school" vs. "goofing off" vs. "student" profiles that I can toggle between on my school laptop. When I'm using it for school, I use the school profile, which keeps me on the straight and narrow. When I want to check my webcomics at home, I use the "goofing off" profile, and when a student wants to use it, I set it to the "student" profile. This should totally be a little button on the bottom right or something.
Task Manager for the Browser. Once when I complained to Jono that FF was acting up, he said, "try turning off your add-ons and then turning them back on one at a time." Given that the issue would only arise on odd days while watching videos of b-boys, and given that I have about 10 add-ons, this would have taken me 10 weeks to figure out. Since I do so many things on the browser that it's akin to its own operating system, I really wish there was some sort of Task Manager equivalent where I can see whether it's a tab or an add-on that's acting up, and close exclusively that tab/add-on.
Hmm.... that's it for now. I guess I will finish by asking myself the question, "What is it, in 2011, that is keeping me with Firefox?" The answer: Session Restore, Awesome Bar, and my two download-related add-ons: Download Status Bar, and Video DownloadHelper.
no subject
Speed
This is less now, as everything generally works better, but FF3 really slowed down and that's when I jumped to Chrome. Part of it is that speed ties somewhat into reliability- if a page is going to fail to load altogether, I'd rather know in 3 seconds than 30 seconds.
Tab Management
Somewhat like you, I have different browsing needs, so different uses for Tabs. Chrome's drag & drop tab thing made it easy for me to self organize tabs - if I need different groupings of tabs, I just pull it out into it's own window, and then it's really easy. (I sometimes do this as my version of the "tree" organization you mentioned).
I'm not hardcore enough in use to need more than that, and other stuff just didn't really do it for me. I suppose a useful thing which I do miss about having a Mac is the hot corner option- it made things easy to find all my open windows and bounce between them. I guess someone could make a browser version of that.
Syncing
Funny enough, I don't really use this at all. My work computer and home computers are used for very different things, and while I may jump onto Facebook or the Forge during a break at work, it's not like I have more than a 5-6 sites I do that with- most everything else is stuck to work related stuff.
In a certain way, I guess it's a bit about digital divide - how many people own more than 1 computer and need the feature?
In a lot of ways, I guess I'm the basis type user who really only has a few needs, and that they're done well and reliably.
no subject
Re: Sync: I'd only need to sync if I found some nice work-related links on my home computer, so I don't use it that much. I'd much prefer of the Sync synchronized my user experience by making sure all my settings and addons are the same.
no subject
I can see the syncing for preferences. I guess part of it is that I haven't really found myself needing add-ons for awhile, now, and so my preferences are pretty easy to work with.
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no subject