Retaking the web browser, one small step at a time

There should definitely be a more convenient way to 'forget this site'. In Firefox it's hidden in right clicking on the site entry in History. For Chromium it seems to be a 7 step process unless invoking developer tools as History doesn't present a 1-click way to remove a whole site.

Edit: And for mobile even more obscure.

In a negotiation, the goal is to reach an accommodation suitable for both parties. If the web developer doesn't want to set up his server on port 80 to serve HTTP, that's his business. Your user agent is still working for you, when it negotiates with the server what protocols it will accept. (It also negotiates a content type for the response; and if all the server has is static HTML, it's not your user agent's fault if what you get is HTML, even if you really wanted some other format. Take it up with the web developer, if you want the data in some other format. The browser is just doing its best for you.)

Your argument makes sense in one narrow circumstance which is not the typical HSTS setup: if the server is serving the site with plain HTTP on port 80 (and not just a redirect to the HTTPS version of the page), and also has a HTTPS version with HSTS headers. (So that the first time you visit the HTTPS version, your browser will insist on taking you to that version every time.)

> Case in point which I'm fighting with at this very minute: HTTP. I want to access a site over HTTP, not HTTPS.

I think there's a fix for this in firefox and its forks, browser.fixup.fallback-to-https or dom.security.https_first maybe... at least they used to allow you to disable that sort of thing.

While I find this mildly annoying at times, it's a good reminder that I can just hardcode the port if I want HTTP

Browsers need to be more eager to offer workarounds for things like... that dang snake oil TLS cert on the ISP's router setup in a weird way but in the 'reserved' private use address ranges.

NOT automatically, but with an accommodation that asks the user if they're _expecting_ to talk to a device such as a "Modem" or "ISP Router" when making that request, and offer to do what's necessary to connect.

Don't forget what search engine is default, what sponsored stories are shown, turn those off, it's suggested stories next. Oh your bookmarks, why not share those with us, browser experiments, ... Thought that's enoigh? No, let's disable APIs that ad blockers use and replace them using BS excuses. Don't get me wrong, the companies developing the browsers spend money that they have to make somehow on the other end but at least there used to be usable community driven browsers..

Out of curiosity, why do you want unencrypted HTTP when HTTPS is available?

We shouldn't be fighting. We're powerless. The anti-trust regulators should be taking up this fight.

Google should be broken into several companies.

A breakup would be good for shareholders. Google would be worth more as separate companies, because currently they're giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in value for free.

They'd also have to be more nimble, which would increase fitness instead of being an overfed goldfish in a tiny pond.

A breakup would oxygenate the field for competition and innovation. Right now, Google is killing all the competition with their platform pricing power.

Engineers would be better compensated too, as more firms would have to compete for talent.

The hulking behemoth is bad for everyone, including Google itself.

>I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory

Are you on Safari? If so even switching to Chrome would have helped, and if you are have more than a hundred tabs than use Firefox.

>Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks

Completely agree as it has been the case for the last 25+ years since Tabs were invented.

I keep the Tabs opened as more like a ToDo-List. Saving me from going back and forth so I understand your frustration. Having drop down list in Chrome and Firefox allows you quickly Garbage collect from unused tabs. Which is already much better than the old days as this is a fairly recent additions. ( May be pass ~5 years )

Tree-Tabs sounds good in theory but in practice over the past 15+ years or so most of the tree tabs implementation dont work for me. Mostly an UI issue. Category of Tabs or sometimes called Tab Group seems to be the closest thing. I actually quite like Tab Groups on Chrome, and surprisingly Firefox over the years have tried many implementation but nothing like what chrome has offered ( at least by default )

I use Tab groups on both Safari and Chrome, one group for HN, one group for RSS feed. These two groups keep nearly 80-90% of new tabs generation for me already. So while it is not perfect it is a lot less of a mess than what I had. The rest are random thoughts that came up into my mind and I need some tabs research into it.

I looked at improving this a few years ago when looking for a product to do.

There are lots of ways to improve bookmarking, content recall etc on the web. Nobody is willing to pay for them.

1. Users don't pay for them. I found lots of startups with the same idea that had pivoted, mostly into dedicated research tools for academics.

2. Browser makers don't pay for them, because if they make their bookmarking tools bad then people search more, and they get paid for search referrals. So making bookmarking or history search better hurts their own revenue.

Nobody is willing to pay. So, nobody gets improvements. If people start being willing to pay for their browser, you'll see them get better at stuff like this.

Massively agreed. I've had this problem for years and always have hundreds, sometimes thousands of tabs open, spread across a couple dozen windows. Memory usage is actually pretty alright with Chrome these days as the vast majority of tabs stay unloaded, and its Memory Saver feature also unloads opened tabs over time, so it's perfectly usable even with 16GB of RAM. Before that I had to use The Great Suspender to keep the memory usage in check.

I feel like I've tried every tab/bookmark managing app/extension under the sun and none of them stuck. I've also thought about creating my own, but it feels like even I don't know what I'm looking for exactly. The main problem I have is that they all have too much friction compared to simply keeping the tabs open. It would have to be something deeply integrated into the browser.

Vivaldi has some really cool tab management features and it would be my main browser of choice, but with my amount of tabs, windows and extensions its UI performance degraded to the point of becoming unusable, whereas Chrome held up just fine. Granted it has been a couple of years since I last tried it so that might have improved since. I'd still recommend anyone with similar "power user" needs to give it a try. It's a pretty awesome browser.

Tab Groups in Chrome are actually surprisingly decent as well. They're pretty low friction, and open tab groups even sync across devices, including mobile, in (near) real time now, which is great. But I do have some issues with them causing me not to use them. For example, when you re-open a closed tab group it will instantly load all of the tabs inside of it, instead of keeping each tab unloaded until visited, like on startup. You also can't add tabs to a closed tab group. So you either always have to keep the tab group open, meaning they're not much more than a visual aid and only slightly more useful than bookmark folders, or store fewer tabs per group, making them even less useful. They also have the same "object permanence" issue as bookmarks, where it's simply too easy to forget about a closed tab group altogether once I close it.

I feel like I want a dedicated bookmarking app that integrates with the browser but is distinct from it. That has full "library management" features: nested folders AND tags AND something for more temporary storage.

> Bookmarks suck

They suck so bad lol. I bookmark something planning to look back at it the next day. I actually end up looking at the bookmark a year later thinking "oh ya, that".

> all the major web browsers have given up on being the User Agent, and instead act as the web developer's agent.

The elephant in the room: Chrome is owned by Google and Chromium is only a stripped down version with no independent development, Apple/Safari is paid by Google, Firefox is paid by Google.

We could argue design decisions aren't directly dictated by Google in regards to Safari and Firefox, but we're also not seeing any major decision that straight goes against Google's interests.

The most we've seen from Safari is manual element removal, and on iOS only.

I think you want the "save tabs" feature of https://histre.com/ Not only can you restore the browser state, the search in histre is the best, if I can say so myself (it's mine). If you let histre save your browsing history, you don't even have explicitly save tabs or create bookmarks. You can just search to find anything you've ever touched.

https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/

There is a Firefox WebExtension that unloads memory from unused tabs, it works quite well. Enough that a window with many many tabs only uses about 10% of RAM on an 8GB machine. That might be a start.

https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

Extensions are the main reason I use Firefox on Android. I'm more committed to it there than I am on desktop.

Of course, Firefox also broke extensions on Android for several years, during which I mostly used a lightly tweaked Chromium build called Kiwi Browser.

Extensions do give the user more power - I guess that's part of the reason they are not available on mobile.

I think Brave could be a pioneer here and add a further point of differentiation by allowing extensions.

I think the second one is just a userChrome.css tweak? It’s in between the WebExtensions and the omni tweaks I’d say.

userChrome tweaks can get you a long way – for example, I’ve reimplemented the Australis-like tabs (for the nostalgia sake, mostly) using that. Of course, the downside is those tweaks break with updates sometimes.

If you’re wokring on a userChrome tweak, you might want to enable devtools for the browser UI itself: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/browse...

> I continue to think RSS Reader should be a function of browser

There's a spotty history of this. Internet Explorer 7 had the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds: https://www.bnsf.com/customers/rss/browsers-ie7.html

I like having my RSS as a separate entity of my browser. I have a server that runs an RSS aggregator (FreshRSS), and I can hit it via multiple clients, from the built-in web to a mobile app.

By the time user owned ai agents are able to run on the kind of devices most people have they'll all be banned on the app stores just like any other non-pre-approved application that hasn't been paid for on the app stores will be. For "security reasons". Maybe there will be user owned/controlled ai agents for people with desktop computers and open source operating systems though.

I think the computing requirements to run a local agent are high enough that it'll always be more niche than browsers and certainly unlikely on phones, which already means you're probably running it on the cloud or something.