[Groxx]

>15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine.

No, 15 years ago you could reasonably write a search engine for 15 years ago. It would suck by today's standards.

You want to handle Javascript? Easy! There are plenty of tools to choose from now. Run a browser as your crawler, visit the sites, and read the generated source instead of the static source. Shove that into your 15-years-ago search engine, and there's no difference.

>Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were

You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

>Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages...

has become a community effort, instead of a bunch of isolated silos where people reinvented the wheel out of necessity.

The resources required aren't so large just because it's so much more complex, it's large because it's so much faster, and you won't survive if you can't compete. How long did we languish with crappy Javascript engines? How much would you need to know to actively compete in that section alone now? It's easy to make a slow-but-functional browser, and if you looked around you'd see some people doing just that. Making a fast-and-resilient one is as hard as making a fast-and-resilient anything, especially where human input (ie, HTML) is expected to be consumed.

[cypherpunks]

> You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.

[JoshTriplett]

We actually built a site to solve that problem. If you have a series of pages (blog, comic, book, etc) and want to mark your place in them with a bookmark that moves as you read, try Serialist (https://serialist.net/).

[Groxx]

There's an "edit" option as well.

As to the auto-updating bookmarks, would it resolve the issue if I made an extension to do that for you? I can see the use, honestly, and I like it. (seriously, I'm offering, and I'd probably use it myself. It'd be an interesting project. Even if it doesn't resolve the issue - we might just fundamentally disagree here, I'm OK with that.)

But why should that be part of the browser, when modern browsers allow you to do damn near anything by simply leveraging it? Why should we rely on browser makers to tell us what's possible, when we can do it ourselves, because of the changes in the past 15 years?

[cypherpunks]

I'd love to see that extension. If you write it, I will use it. I use Chrome too, so it should work here.

As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.

When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.

[IChrisI]

If you want to move a bookmark to a different place on a blog / content site, it is probably because you want to read new entries. RSS does this fairly well.

If you want to read through a site's archives, what I do is keep it open in a tab. It is restored when I reopen my browser, saved if I reboot, etc. It's not as handy as a bookmark, but it comes close.