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Ask HN: What is your wishlist for a new browser interface?
3 points by arn4v 870 days ago
Browsers today are not made for the kind of browsing that I often do: playful surfing. When I say playful surfing, this XKCD strip comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/214/

I'm doing an open-ended exploration on what I'd like a new browser to look like, and the workflows/modalities I want it to unlock.

Pain points:

- Navigating a flat list of tabs feels like a chore

- Tab search only indexes title/url, not the content - If I have 50 tabs opened, currently on tab 35, and remember a vague term I read in one of the 34 tabs before – How do I trace my way back to it?

- Bookmarking should be tag based, not folder based

- History is siloed

My wishlist:

- Tree-style tabs sidebar (like the Firefox add-on)

- Full-text search over open tabs with ability to narrow down on specific sub-trees

- Interaction-aware search ranking. For instance, if you scroll 60% of the way through on one tab and then search for a term that existed at the 55% mark on that tab, it should be show up first.

- Tag based bookmarking

- Built-in annotation tools & Google-docs style collaborative marginalia

- Timeline-based history (Inspired by https://maggieappleton.com/historical-trails)

- Bring your own sync server / self-hostable sync server

- Everything gets saved to a SQLite database, so you can plug it into your own home-made tools

What features would you like to see in a new browser (interface)? What workflows would you want it to unlock?

3 comments

I have one wish for every program I use, whether it’s a browser or not - let me use the keyboard exclusively. I don’t care about your UI, I’m not here to be wow’d by design. I don’t want to remember where on the screen or hidden in menus you put my obscure command, which I happen to use regularly.

Better yet, give me a keyboard-shortcuts.json that I can customize myself, in case one of your commands conflicts with one on my machine.

I want to get in and out of your shitty program as quickly as I can and get on with my life.

~ end old man rant

If you don't care about UI and want keyboard only, perhaps a terminal browser such as Lynx would be of interest.
Bookmarks stored as pseudo-files in the regular file system and accessible via the browser or double clicking the file directly.
This reminds me of TabFS: https://omar.website/tabfs/
I would like a browser where I can (optionally) restrict answers to my choice of sites which I curate myself and the browser helps me manage.
By answers are you referring to search engine results? Or tab/bookmark search filters?
Search engine results.