What's one thing you wished browsers did better?

[kilian]

I couldn't stick to one thing so I'm building my own browser, but I'd love to hear all of your dream improvements. Who knows, maybe someone has the perfect extension or replacement for you :)

I'll go first:

Browsers have gotten much better in recent times with regard to their address bar, where you can also type parts of titles and parts of urls to match your history, but that only works if you correctly remember the url or page title. There a couple of plugins that do this, but I'd love to be able to find content in my browser history more easily when I don't quite remember the site, so something like a full text search of pages (easily doable nowadays) or something that also works with synonyms and related words integrated in the address bar would be amazing.

 

[frood]

An optional extended status bar for every page: How many resources are still loading, at what avg. download speed, how many have been loaded, how much memory does it all take up, do Javascript events fire? I want to see what pages are up to and how "busy" and "heavy" they are, without having to open the dev tools all the time.

Typing URL in the address bar is really sucky with current browsers, it's all in one list, no meaningful config. I'd prefer the N top hits from open tabs, my bookmarks, and pages in history (with the option to expand the list). The browser should try to figure out what is "most relevant" inside these categories, but not mix them. Have something in the popup for suggestions to toggle searching the page body, url, and/or title (usually you'd want all, but sometimes not).

For history, I'd like separate caches and cache sizes for URL/title, and for the full text of the page. Allow the users to set the priority of domains (normal, important, and unimportant), so when the max cache size gets exceeded, the least important stuff gets removed first.

 

[adam]

It would be handy to have a responsive mode that accurately simulated the changing heights that the iOS browser chrome does when moving around a page!

 

[kilian]

@frood the way you described that reminded me that my email client thunderbird does exactly that with the quick filter options, they make it very easy to search in sender, title, contents etc, and filter for unread, with attachements etc. Something like that in a browser would be great.

It would be handy to have a responsive mode that accurately simulated the changing heights that the iOS browser chrome does when moving around a page!

One of the cool things in IOS13 is that while the visible height still changes when you scroll up and the address bar changes into just the domain, your site's viewport no longer changes (this is great when you use vh units in your code, as it used to have a sucky "jump" because of this).