What features do browsers lack?

Some browsers, like Internet Explorer and Firefox have hundreds of optional extensions, but they miss a few of the obvious.

  • We need a Next and Previous key for any page with Next an Previous arrows.

  • We need a way to stop ALL moving swimming blinking stuff. We have popup blockers and Flash killers and you can kill “looping gifs” by hitting Esc. But you still have sites that use “marquee text” and sliding blocks of text and other infuriating distractions while you’re trying to read.

  • Hi Opal.

  • There’s a Reload button, but what I want when one or two images fail to load completely is a “reload just the failures” button, so I don’t have to wait again for the stuff I already have. Even the right-click “Show Image” disconnects on an error, just when it would be useful.

  • We need a way to shift absolutely any option up top, instead of buried in a maze of option blocks and tabs.

  • We need a way to absolutely stop the window from whatever it’s doing. Freeze. The Esc key seems disabled on many screens with multiple image loads, and also with most scripts. On some TV sites you can only pause the ads by shutting down the browser.

  • We really need a Back button that actually just shows you what you saw before, without reloading and/or resubmitting things. Just simple look at something you were looking at a second ago, not reloaded. Including all the stuff you typed in the holes.

  • And the Back button should follow the entire path back, not just the “current branch of the tree”, but up and back up and back every page just as you viewed it.

  • History used to show that complete list of pages, but now they’ve been grouped in odd ways of no use to me, like alphabetically, when I don’t recall what site I was looking at when I saw what I want to reread. So an option for strict chronological images ought to exist.

  • The word processing keys like Ctrl-Home should work. You can reach the top of the page, but not the left top corner. And when you get there with keys, the Find function is not positioned there with you but stuck somewhere else.

  • There should be some way to get rid of all the wasted space when a feature wipes out an entire swath of the screen. Right now I have an entire line with the single word Done, and another entire line with the single word Find, and another with the page name which I never look at and the X box that I never use to close the window.

  • Where something is longer than the window, I’d like a option to just have it shown in full, like a url that wraps to four lines but you only can see a 1/2 line peek of it in the Properties hole, while there are gobs of blank areas on the same popup block.
    What do you think they’ve missed?

I don’t know about all browsers since I’ve only used Firefox and occasionally chrome for the past few years. But I’d like to see:

  • Remapable hotkeys
  • A mute button / volume control

K-Meleon does most of what you want. Like Firefox, K-Meleon is based on the Mozilla engine.

And you can write your own macro for just about anything you want, or if you have trouble doing this, ask someone one the forums over there and they’ll do it for you.

I love K-Meleon 'cause you just hit Javascript and instantly it’s off, then you hit it again and it’s instantly on again. Same with Java, Flash, Images etc.

I strongly urge people to use K-Meleon as you can’t beat it for speed. Nothing is more lightweight than this, and even at dialup it goes as quick as your connection will allow.

Certainly re-jigging the History viewer is a good one. Alphabetic listing? That’s of no help to me to find that page I want. Reverse chronology, please.

I use Firefox which has some great extensions that I use. I recently got introduced to an extension I didn’t even know I was missing. Open a new tab, but have it be an IE tab. Wow! No more having to load up the IE browser every time a page fails to load properly in Firefox.

I could use that. I have to go to IE once a day for something or other that Firefox screws up. For example last week on my Kaiser Medical sleep diary questionnaire, the very first night’s AM/PM button could be switched with Firefox although the other days were fine. So I had to go to IE to get the right answers. On today’s newspaper comment page the Send button just sat there, so I went to IE to post my comment. Not a big deal, but the extension would solve the problem.

It has reverse chronology - but it’s not separated into days, and it only keeps the most recent visit to any given page, and not the 25 other times you visited it previously. Very annoying.

I’d also like it to remember the text on the page, and in the forms. If I go back in my history to last Tuesday, I want to see what was on those pages last Tuesday.

These so much.

I think Chrome does it this way.

I would like a way to block out areas of the screen.
When I view Conan O’Brian clips, there are stupid flashing ads top bottom and sometimes on the side for tampons, viagra , etc. So I cover them with postit notes. This could be done with an overlay mask you could turn on and off.

Also, sometimes even though you block something, like a popup or an image, that is done only AFTER the thing has loaded. They should figure out how to avoid loading them in the first place.

I hate to be the wet blanket but…

  • We need a Next and Previous key for any page with Next an Previous arrows.

This is a minor security risk. Also it would require for web page developers to adhere to a non-mandatory standard, which won’t happen.

  • We really need a Back button that actually just shows you what you saw before, without reloading and/or resubmitting things. Just simple look at something you were looking at a second ago, not reloaded. Including all the stuff you typed in the holes.

This is a super huge privacy/security risk for users of public terminals.

Not so. Browser developers and the standard page builders are constantly adding features that require something from the browsers. That’s why many pages will say they only are guaranteed to work with version X or higher.

The original way to go Back was to use the Back button placed on the page. Then the browsers figured out how to do that and the button disappeared from most sites.

I think if Internet Explorer said their Next and Previous key worked for any link with a Next and Previous construct, and MS put it into their page editors, then within two months every browser would support that. And by this time next year all the sites I go to often would be upgraded. The slow-to-change sites wouldn’t use it, of course, but they appear antiquated right now for many other reasons.

Not so. It’s impossible to be a security risk if the site provides the arrows. The options already exist, the only difference is in how they are selected.

My change is so stupid simple, I can’t believe no one has yet implemented it: The “Back” button should become the “Stop” button whenever a page is loading.

Whenever I accidently click a link, I automatically head for the “Back” button as–usually–the next page has already started loading. But sometimes this isn’t the case and my “Back” press takes me to the previous page, forcing me to reload it by clicking “Forward.”

Yeah, it’s a minor issue, but this really would make my life easier–plus it could cutdown on the need for having an exclusive “stop” button.

This is already part of an, albeit obscure, HTML standard. Firefox has options for doing this but they’re off by default.

I want a plugin that will cause a tab to blink if it starts playing audio or video in the background. Too often, I’ve had to mute my sound and then hunt through 30 tabs to figure out which one was playing.

Just an observation: I’ve never heard anybody refer to fields as “holes” before.

Some browser have an option for “full screen” mode. I know Firefox and IE on Windows both do. I almost never use it (only when using a projector with very low res) but you might look into it.

One way to see what should be added into browsers is to check out the top extensions that people have written for Firefox. It’s impressive what can be done with Firefox. A lot of times I’ll think of an idea, search for it and it’s already been done by 2 or 3 people. I was browsing Craigslist and thinking there must be a way to organize everything, and sure enough someone had written something called Craigslist Image Prefetcher that takes all the images of items and displays them together on the page of your search results or a category’s page. There’s also something called Craigzilla that monitors different searches for you automatically.

One thing is that it should be easier to make and delete bookmarks. There used to be a Firefox extension called Add Bookmark Here. It put a menu item in each folder to add a bookmark there. However, it should also be easier to delete them. You should be able to right-click a bookmark and delete it from a context menu.

I’d like a way to highlight text (in yellow background, not reverse white on black) and have it stay highlighted until you close the window.
And remain highlighted if you save the page to reference later.

I’d like it if every page could be saved. Some are able to block this, which is BS. I have the page in front of me, I can save it one screen capture at a time, just let me save it already.

The Firefox extension NextPlease does this pretty well.

Unfortunately the official release doesn’t support FF 3.5. There’s an unofficial update available here, but I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it.

Thanks! And they said it couldn’t be done (or at least Red Skeezix).

  • A Find that doesn’t leave your key word down on the very last line of the window, making you scroll. Find it and then scroll it up a little so you can see it in context. Some current Find fuctions will leave the found word just tucked under the bottom bar so only its top couple pixels appear. Why can’t they see this is dopey? Don’t they use Find themselves?

  • I’d like a Bookmark/Favorites feature that remembers the position on the page where you were when you saved it. Firefox does this for same-session Recently Closed Tabs and it is very useful.

  • I’d like a Bookmark/Favorites feature that can save your specific page at those sites that always force you to the home page. Sprint and HomeDepot do this. I often want to save the page with an interesting phone or tool and it doesn’t let me.

  • I’d like to control the little icons that appear when you save a favoite to the Links bar. At one time you could, and then the sites figured out how to override your choices and force their own logo. I used to have three different Yahoo icons, one for mail, one for shopping, one for weather. But now they all have the same Y! icon and my choices are gone.

One feature Firefox* had*, and then just took away with version 3.5, was the ability to clear the last tab without exiting the browser. At the end of watching David Letterman an ad comes on and I just want to clear it before I think what next to browse for. In this new version I have to open an empty tab before I’m allowed to go back and close the one I want to. Both Excel and Word let you close the last item without killing the program, and I tend to do that a lot.

I’d like the browser to let me have multiple cookies for a site. I have my regular Yahoo account and my “forum and comment posting” account that collects the spam from that. They can nominally each be left logged in for two weeks, but if you check each one each day then you are back to lots of logins. I’ll eave it to the implementer techs to tell me the selection method details.