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by malodyets 911 days ago
What features or benefits would a small fraction of people love in an alt browser?

What would HN folk love in a browser?

5 comments

> What would HN folk love in a browser?

A setting to completely disable support for media elements per-origin would be nice. Not this "we try to determine whether a video is eligible for autoplaying" bullshit. I want an "I wasn't asking" approach of the browser literally treating <video> and <audio> as unknown tags when this setting is off.

Native support for Flash via Ruffle would also be nice.

If it's a mobile browser, I really, REALLY want a setting to just completely annihilate all the PWA stuff. No, I don't want to add this random news website to my home screen, thank you very much.

More broadly, I want most of the "progress" of the web platform undone. Sure, new CSS features, like flexbox and grid, are nice. But all those new JS APIs that (try to) turn a hypertext document viewer into a (terrible) operating system? No thanks. I want my clear boundary between the "document" and the "application" back, hence the Flash thing.

Something less annoying to opt into web features would really be an improvement. Perhaps some "upgrade icon" next to that https lock icon? This already is the place were we take away the permission when we accidentally allowed some we did not want, and the "upgrade" would be somewhat parseable as all three of "upgrade to local(ish) installation", "upgrade to more site features" (push) and "allow more data upload" (location). All implicitly connected to the hostname.
for first: firefox + umatrix, you're welcome
Mouse gestures, opera had these back in the day. The right-left click to go back, ability to close a tab from anywhere on the page with just a single hand, etc.

Maybe it's no longer possible due to all the click hijacking introduced by web2.

Vivaldi and Firefox (via extensions) still have mouse gestures and there aren't any problems with it.
you still have this on keyboard with 1 hand tho
Lots of HN people are fascinated by Arc. That's a good place to start looking.
Can second this - Arc is my daily driver now
Being able to browse the web and not have pages render incorrectly, slowly or not at all is the big one.
Not tracking me and selling data to ad network buyers.