| I've been championing the same issues, or rather bemoaning them on HN repeatedly. I never see much innovation with the actual browser UIs. The rendering engines get plenty of love, while something like the UI for Firefox has barely changed at all. I used to have an aging powerpc, and Firefox would bring it to it's knees. But I think I was abusing it. Firebug, Flash, JS and too many tabs were the main culprits. And I have sinced tried to change my habits. I think tabs are heavily used and abused! I personally believe that they are so popular because the bookmark UIs are so sucky. Most tabs could be replaced by a bookmark. Tabs bring other problems, resizing the browser window in one tab, effects all the others. Tabs have inconsistant behaviour between different applications. Windows should be left to a window manager IMHO. Now I try and keep my tabs to a minimum. Two or three. Any page I think I might want to read later I once bookmarked (to one day sort through...), but now I send to readability to read later at my leisure. My main browser I have configured to make reading on it more pleasurable. I've throw away the page author's styles, and instead opt to use my own font, font size and colour scheme. I block adverts. And block flash. Layouts can suffer, but if I have to, I resort to using another browser. I did have JS turned off completely, but I am finding that increasingly difficult. In terms of design trends - responsive web pages are quite welcome in my world. I think people will soon hunger for simpler pages and simpler sites. Something that's far easier to use. And I welcome the day that I can actually surf web pages comfortably on my TV when sitting on my arse. Some sites are still very difficult to use, and the browser UIs could really lend a hand here. |