
Ask HN: What is the future of browsers? - skdjksjdksjdk
I am trying to understand what features would be in next generation browsers? What would your favourite browsers look like?
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erikpukinskis
To some extent, you can look at mobile app platforms for guidance:

\- identity service

\- payment services

\- 3D positioning data, including 6DOF

\- hand tracking and object tracking (AR)

In terms of future-y stuff, I can see some sort of blockchain integration,
like CloudStorage as an IPFS version of LocalStorage. That would potentially
need to dovetail with the identity and payment stuff.

I suspect as we get deeper into AR times, some kind of device-relative geo
services will need to be necessary. Like, give me a list of services that are
within 1 foot, 20 feet, and 1000 feet respectively.

Personally, I also think the browser is ready to make the leap to a kind of
raw metal relationship with hardware. ChromeOS is an example of this, Firefox
OS was an attempt. I'd like to see more specialized OS's that can boot
hardware directly to the web. The security models on Mac and Windows are
slowly approaching something more like the web anyway, where apps run in a
sandbox. Web pages have been doing that forever, so it seems like a good fit
for a security-conscious OS.

A mobile headset would be a good opportunity for such an OS to differentiate
itself. Which leads me to...

The other huge opportunity I think is in web "filters". We've gotten to the
point now that there's just a lot of crap out there, and with ad blockers and
readability filters we've started to dabble in a meta layer. I think a future
web browser will go full meta, where by default you don't see the actual web
page, you see a thumbnail and a bunch of views on the data in that web page,
and you only dip down into the giant messy interactive ad-riddled view if you
want to.

Past endeavors include the whole space of web annotation, semantic web, etc.
Not sure why none of that has taken off, but seems like something that will
find product market fit eventually.

One of those "filters" could be an AR filter. Take a web page and map it into
AR space. Also VR. Add avatars of other people around the content. But there
should be a whole marketplace of filters, language translation, low power
filter, etc. Opera was doing some version of that. You could have political
filters too. "Block all misogyny", "Add Fox News' take", "Keep everything tidy
and German" etc.

A lot of this marks a general transition from a site POV to a user POV for the
browser.

If anyone wants consultation on any of these ideas, I'm available for hire. :)

~~~
nealabq
This is a visionary comment. It's looking at the 10-year future. Let me add
two thoughts:

What we do now is "surf". We view info as pages, which are presentations
constructed and filtered by someone else. What you're suggesting is that
instead of surfing the surface, we could dive deep into the info-ocean and
construct a presentation for ourselves. The future-browser is the tool to
enable that.

I'm guessing that eventually we'll each have an AI that learns how we want to
consume info; an AI that eventually becomes an assistant. She will become the
layer between us and the info-ocean, filtering, organizing and presenting, and
even suggesting, guiding and teaching. She know our interests and habits, read
our emails, and take our phone calls. She may be owned and controlled by a
corporation, like Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assist. Or maybe we'll be
able to construct our own AI-assistant, integrated into our browser/phone/AR-
headset.

Right now we're the fish, hooked by advertising and branding schemes coated
with a layer of technology. Someday maybe some fish can hide behind a
technology layer of their own.

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imaginenore
Browsers seem to be converging.

It's quite obvious that they will all implement next JS standards, with some
experiments here and there.

They will add API access to more hardware like VR helmets, controllers, maybe
even USB devices (which would be great for web hardware based security, like
2FA).

Probably voice control and typing (like on Android).

Probably automatic translation (not just by Google).

Built-in free VPN (limited obviously) and TOR would be nice.

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dabockster
Hopefully there will be more browsers/engines than just 2-3 large ones. I know
that will make web dev difficult, but it will encourage the most innovation
online.

I'm sick of having to choose between either Firefox, Edge, or a thousand
Chrome knockoffs. There needs to be more diversity.

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csense
My favorite browser?

Ability to set ceiling for memory usage and bandwidth per tab. It has
traditional boxy 1990's style design, a traditional File, Edit, etc., none of
this hamburger menu crap. It suspends or kills background tabs.

An empty browser uses 1MB of memory or less. A full browser never uses more
than 256MB of memory.

In addition to JavaScript, it supports a compiled language out of the box,
like Java, but open source, secure, and non-bloated.

It has "skinny goggles" which let you trim the fat from webpages, removing
unnecessary CPU, bandwidth and memory usage while keeping the site readable.

Audio and video content is blocked in each tab until you specifically allow
it.

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osrec
I think the main browsers will continue to dominate (it's tough work to launch
and maintain a browser, so there's a high bar to entry). I feel native
features will continue to be exposed via the browser, and eventually, I can
see web apps eventually replacing their native counterparts. I am personally a
big fan of web apps, and prefer them to native downloads that highjack my
phone or computer - browsers just need to be careful to manage permissions to
intrusive APIs in a sensible manner.

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NikolaeVarius
I would love a browser that didn't take 100mb of memory per tab. Though I'm
not sure how much of that is to blame on the browser/plugins or the webpage.

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srcmap
Love to the Servo from Mozilla take over the world soon.

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TomMarius
I would love a way to ditch HTMl/CSS and use a thin abstraction on top of
native GUI toolkits (WinAPI, Qt, Gtk, Cocoa...) instead.

~~~
skdjksjdksjdk
This is indeed a great idea but the only problem is that these frameworks may
not fit today's responsive needs

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llccbb
I have been enjoying using selenium as a programmatic interface with the
browser. Hopefully more of that!

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fairpx
I think the best part of the browser are the extensions and plugins people
make.

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jlebrech
a web os, basically a browser will be something like android but without
needing to download an app first.

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trentmb
Accessibility

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maxk42
WebAsm

