
Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked to Try - ingve
http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2019/03/firefox-experiments-i-would-have-liked.html
======
blaze33
I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use
Firefox (or any other browser) like that.

I'm still waiting for a better UX on this use case. Bookmarks are hidden
behind menus and require some work to organize and sort them: it's easier to
leave an open tab in plain sight that reminds me to eventually read it and
decide whether to close it or save it as a useful resource.

Last actual improvement I noticed was when Firefox stopped fully reloading
every tab in session restoration.

Any actual research on user-friendly UX to manage and organize lots of
potentially useful urls ?

~~~
atombender
I keep lots of tabs open because of "projects".

For example, let's say I'm planning a trip. I will have tabs open for Google
Flights, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Google Maps and so on. A single window is one
"project". It doesn't make sense to have those tabs open _all_ the time --
just when I need them. Yet I have to keep them open because browsers don't
have a way to treat a single window as a kind of persistent tab set. The best
browsers can do right now is to bookmark multiple tabs as a folder and then
later restore them. That's not too useful since there's no way to update this
folder the same way.

What I'd like is to have windows be "named". I want to save my window as
"Puerto Rico trip" and close it. Later I want to open it again and continue
where I was. At all times my tabs and history are associated with the same
"project".

I've been longing for this feature for maybe 10 years now. I started
developing it as a Safari extension once, but ran into limitations in the
API's support for opening windows.

~~~
epanchin
Doesn’t quite solve your issue, but creating a bookmark folder “trip planning”
and saving all relevant sites into it and the folder onto your bookmarks bar -
then right click on the new folder and click open all. I have a few sets of
pages I load like this.

~~~
theelous3
Such a load of hassle though. Double clicking a name section on the title bar
and closing it would be way better. Have references to windows all autosave
and be accessible from any other window in a window menu.

------
curioussavage
What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think any
of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this point.
Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought.

I want really good tab management built in through some kind of workspace. I
want something more than just profiles a workspace should be kind of like an
editor workspace and provide different tools to help you be productive.

A minimal UI and user configurable keyboard shortcuts would be great too.

I wish I had written down more of my thoughts but I think to sum it up - all
browsers are trying to compete for the average customer. I would pay money for
a power user/developer focused browser.

For now I’m trying to customize qutebrowser to get closer to what I want.

~~~
orbital-decay
_> What I really want is a keyboard centric power user browser. I don’t think
any of the big browsers could even turn into something like that at this
point. Power user feature like keyboard shortcuts are an after thought._

Big browsers are fine, you absolutely can browse with a keyboard in
vimperator/pentadactyl/tridactyl without touching a mouse in months (I do).
Other users above/below suggested vimium and vimperator-style extensions, and
just look at the difference. Vimium is simple and works great in 9/10 cases,
but there's always that one little element or a quirk where it doesn't work.
Vimperator and its descendants work everywhere, but they often require a lot
of manual labor and workarounds just to be able to put the mouse away. And the
difference between 90% and 100% keyboard browsing is massive (no context
switching).

Thing is, the modern web itself is super hostile to the keyboard control and
power users, I don't think this has anything to do with browsers.

~~~
Izkata
> you absolutely can browse with a keyboard in
> vimperator/pentadactyl/tridactyl

> Vimperator and its descendants work everywhere

Vimperator at least has been dead for years, ever since Firefox Quantum. The
switch to WebExtensions was too much, and not everything could be converted
anyway. Don't know about the others you've listed.

Vim Vixen is the closest I've found for the majority of my uses.

~~~
feanaro
This is taking Tridactyl into account?

------
userSumo
One thing i was thinking would be also cool is improving the image view (when
you open .png url for example).it would be nice if it had proper smooth zoom
using mouse wheel, and some preset zoom buttons for fit to screen, 1 to 1
pixel, etc. Maybe it could also open image links in just some simple popup
window.

Other than that i would really like updated bookmark and history manager.

~~~
throwaway66666
So much this. Also the ability to change the background from black to white
(with a slider or an easy to reach color picker that doesn't involve opening
the console). It's so hard to notice when an image starts and ends when it has
black at the sides, or to be able to distinguish transparent pixels easily.

------
ww520
That's a fantastic list of ideas for Firefox. I hope some of them got
implemented as feature in the browser or add-ons.

BTW for Popup Tab Switcher, I had a similar thought and built an add-on for
it, showing tab thumbnails instead of tab list.
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-
tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/)

~~~
ww520
The sticky reader idea is something I myself would use. I hope you don't mind
I steal the idea to build an addon with it. I'm already doing restoring saved
reader mode tabs in my other add-on Session Boss. It's just an extra step to
transfer that functionality to make sticky reader mode work.

------
accountwhatever
One experiment they could try is fixing bookmarklets, which have been broken
for over 6 years now:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=866522](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=866522)

Even this 20 line PR to bring back the most basic functionality has been
languishing for 7 months
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1478037](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1478037)

Another experiment would be allowing the user to set the new tab page to a
local html file without having to create two config files full of magic
incantations.

~~~
severine
I use Bookmarklets Context Menu in Firefox, it's not perfect but it works.

Read about it here: [https://github.com/mems/bookmarklets-context-
menu](https://github.com/mems/bookmarklets-context-menu)

------
popmatrix
It would be great to signify a browser window as my main window where new tabs
are opened rather than using the last focused. Alternatively, I would take a
way of blacklisting a window from letting new tabs be opened. As more and more
apps become web-apps, I like having the apps open in multiple windows on one
monitor and use another monitor for web _browsing_. Having new tabs open,
hiding my email, jira, docs, etc... is a small annoyance but one that would be
great to have remedied.

------
rolleiflex
I just want to have my tabs stop talking to other tabs and their resources /
cookies / caches / spyware / tentacles. Every tab should be a VM. I am willing
to pay a _significant_ performance penalty to achieve that. I have a password
manager, and I'm 100% OK with having to sign-in for every tab as well.

I'm surprised no browser vendor actually ever tried that.

~~~
joecot
Just in case you're unaware, you've seen Container Tabs, right? Now exactly
what you want, but a pretty big step towards it.

Containers are built-in; this extension adds the interface for showing it per
tab.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

~~~
rolleiflex
Yeah, I know it's a big step towards it. But it's not tab isolation — what I
want is a container for every tab by default. In other words, if you can think
of containerising a website as a blacklist, I don't want a blacklist, I want a
whitelist, _everything_ should be containerised by default on every tab.

~~~
nicoburns
You could almost certainly build this as an extension if you wanted to. It's
basically what the "Facebook Container" extension does, except that extension
only does it for facebook.com.

~~~
erinnh
There are extensions for this.

Temporary Container (for temporary sites)+Multi-Account Container (for sites
you want to allow to keep cookies etc)

------
euske
Here's what I want: a complete browsing history with all the keystrokes and
whatnot, or a replayable browser. Sometimes I want to know how I discovered a
certain page that is in my history or bookmarks but quite don't remember. It
would be cool if I could trace back what I was thinking during browsing.

~~~
epage
History is pretty broken.

Some other problems to address

\- You can either search or browse by time, but not search within a time frame
(as far as I know) \- Pages are listed by when you opened a tab, not when you
closed it. I might have a tab open for several days (or _ahem_ years). I look
things up by what I was recently doing, not when I started doing it.

------
clairity
it was interesting to read about the "line of death":
[https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-
death/](https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/)

the chrome doing weird things in the viewport will make users trust unsafe
actions by bad actors, so don't do that.

~~~
Fice
It was discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400291)

Thinking about it I came to realize that there is a much deeper cultural
problem: it became the norm for users to run lots of opaque untrusted code on
their computers. Every application is a threat, as it represents interests of
the vendor rather than the user, and this can not be solved just by isolating
UIs (the line of death) and code (sandboxing), we must reconsider the models
of software distribution that we use. Maybe the Web should not at all be used
as an application platform and instead focus on content and give more control
of its representation to user agents.

And there actually is a software distribution model that gives grounds to
trust — the one used by GNU/Linux distributions where software is not pushed
to the users by vendors directly, but reviewed, built from source and packaged
by distribution maintainers who represent the interests of their users. And of
course, for the maintainers to be trusted, their work must be maximally
transparent and verifiable. Some distributions, like GNU Guix, managed to
advance this model really well, while others are unfortunately now going in
the opposite direction by adopting things like Flatpak and Snap.

~~~
clairity
yes, thanks for adding a more probing analysis.

the web is still great, so i wouldn't like to see it thrown out yet, but maybe
something better (built on gnu/linux?) can supercede it eventually.

open source hardware like arduino and raspberry pi is now near the point of
being powerful, cheap, energy-efficient, connected, small and plentiful enough
that maybe it begins to undergird trustable computing devices for wider
consumption.

google is completely untrustworthy and while apple is better, it's not without
its trustworthiness compromises. with mobile, there's really no 3rd choice
unfortunately (waiting to see how the purism device turns out).

------
chalst
Wrt the "My Homepage" idea: one of the ideas driving IPFS is just this [1]. A
barrier to IPFS is that they (necessarily) reject HTTP in favour of something
in some ways like Bittorent.

Les Orchard wonders if some sort of profit system could bootstrap the system.
The IPFS folk have proposed an interesting cryptocurrency, Filecoin [2],
allowing people who want their content hosted can pay people who offer hosting
services; the core idea is that proof-of-work can be replaced by proof-of-
replication, which I think is a nice idea.

[1]: [https://ipfs.io/#why](https://ipfs.io/#why) [2]:
[https://filecoin.io/](https://filecoin.io/)

------
mrec
_" Studying what Electron does for people ... What gives the app value over
the web page?"_

I always assumed that the immediate benefit here wasn't to the user at all, it
was to the developer who could be 100% sure what engine they were running in,
and so didn't have to bother testing in multiple browsers and versions, or
risk browser updates breaking their site.

~~~
notatoad
But slack and spotify both have websites that offer all the functionality of
their electron app, and people still install the electron apps. They devs
aren't saving any effort by having an electron app if they still have to build
the browser app.

~~~
pragmatick
My colleagues do that and having apps has some advantages (at least on
Windows, no idea about MacOS or linux): You can put in your startup and not
forget to start it when you log in and you can minimize it to the tray.

------
thepangolino
I think those kind of experiments should be the future of web browsers. We the
people, need to take back control from online services.

------
foxhop
* Right click and "remind me later" about this tab.

* Right click and "make a task" out of this tab.

~~~
eythian
For the first one: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/)

~~~
foxhop
Thanks, installed, lets see if I actually use it!

------
pfraze
In a dev branch of beaker, I've been playing around with something similar the
"Modal Page Actions" idea with a "context bar." It has actions based on what
the browser recognizes about the site (stuff like "follow this site" or "view
profile" or "10 comments"). I'd like to have a whole contextual sideview as
well, because I'd like to render trusted interfaces for the given page, but
it's a little tricky to decide when to take real-estate in the shell. Some
people liked it in a demo, and some felt like it's an intrusion. The trick is,
if you make it a toggle then you can't rely on the interface being there so
it's hard to use for critical functions, which makes me think it shouldn't be
a priority yet. We'll see about the context bar.

The "My Homepage" concept will be in the next release. Seems like a good idea.

------
JoshTriplett
The "Personal Historical Archive" notion suggests one specific improvement I'd
love to have: full-text search of my history.

~~~
detaro
I haven't tried it myself, but there was this Show HN a while back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743352)

------
bckmn
It's fun to map each idea into a separate product. Reminds me of Craigslist's
re-bundling [0].

From the post:

> Personal Podcast: > [...] When on an article, you can generate an audio
> version that will be added to the feed > [...] just send/text the link to
> add it to your preferred podcast app

That's exactly what we've built at
[https://www.narro.co](https://www.narro.co) \- with Firefox support via good
ol' vanilla bookmarklet.

\--

[0]: [http://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-rebundling-
of...](http://acrowdedspace.com/post/166470695392/the-rebundling-of-
craigslist)

~~~
reaperducer
_When on an article, you can generate an audio version that will be added to
the feed_

I believe this is possible natively in macOS. Select some text. Control-click
on it and select Services > Add to iTunes as Spoken Track.

------
vanderZwan
> _It would monitor the page inside the browser, so it would have access to
> personalized and authenticated content. A key task would be finding ways to
> present changes in an interesting and compact way. In another experiment I
> tried some very simple change detection tools, and mostly end up frustrated
> (small changes look very large to naive algorithms)._

I'm somewhat surprised by this - I would have expected a modern diffing
algorithm on the HTML (after the page has finished rendering) to work quite
ok. I wonder what would be the reason it doesn't?

~~~
ianbicking
(Author here.) Perhaps it was harder because in the other experiment I was
focusing on applications like gmail. These applications would tend to rerender
large portions of the UI on seemingly small changes. Also I was trying to find
a region that changed, like a rectangle or a portion of the tree, so that I
could show the "interesting" part of a page. These applications didn't easily
split their changes into regions.

The approach where you show the entire page, and show the changes as green/red
or <ins>/<del>, would probably work. But that doesn't lend itself to
summarization, which is where my head was at.

~~~
dmortin
> The approach where you show the entire page, and show the changes as
> green/red

I don't know if you know Distill.

That does this, though that shows the changes only within the part of the page
you selected. It's a change detection tool which works in the browser.
[https://distill.io/](https://distill.io/)

------
bryanrasmussen
The statement "So using RSS would be very reasonable discovery mechanism, but
an “RSS reader” doesn’t seem like a good direction on the current web."
strikes me as needing elaboration.

~~~
ianbicking
(Author here.) The RSS feeds of major news sites gives a list of articles and
titles, but a large portion don't give anything more, and the remainder give
excerpts. So the RSS feeds are more like a headline ticker. It's a good way to
get an up-to-date list of news posts, but not news content.

~~~
ttepasse
A front page of different news sources is in effect a headline ticker. And you
still have the links to the articles which give you detailed information via
Open Graph / Schema.org / h-entry markup.

As a heavy user of feeds I always wanted a feedreader in my browser, but more
with the list in the sidebar and a content main, like in a traditional
feedreader. Firefox' Live Bookmarks did that for a while, but of course
Mozilla killed it. Safari's Twitter integration hat the same model for a
while. Also Opera. But UI-wise all solutions weren't as great; hindered by
integration into bookmarks of general non-nativeness.

Like the current top comment I find it frustrating that browser makers stopped
caring for the power user demographic and effectively stopped competing with
UI features. My ideal browser would be a mixture of the feedreading
capabilities of NetNewsWire 3.2 (Subscribe to a shell script!), the storage
modell of Evernote and such, the tab management of TreeStyleTabs but with the
taste and elegance of OmniWeb 5, the native integration and resourcefulness of
Safari and the configurability of old Opera.

~~~
ianbicking
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing – it's just from a technical point of view
RSS is limited. The next step I'd want to take is to use that list of updated
URLs to fetch content, get Open Graph metadata, maybe try text summarization,
etc. Traditional RSS readers were basically ways to browse the content of a
bunch of RSS feeds, and we need a little more these days to build a good
product.

------
KoenDG
I thought this was going to be about stuff like Ubiquity:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity)

Loved that back when they tried it.

Here's an old screenshot:
[https://imgur.com/O8rN9fK](https://imgur.com/O8rN9fK)

Since there doesn't appear to be any on the site.

It was great. Just directly interact with all kinds of apis from a
commandline-like environment, within your browser.

~~~
ehaughee
With how popular command palettes have become (in things like text editors),
I'm a little surprised this hasn't stuck for browsers. I really enjoyed the
various implementations of this kind of thing for browsers but often found
them lacking in ways that I think a native implementation would be more
effective.

------
archiepeach
I have been working on the timed repetition one for the past couple of years.

[https://vocabifyapp.com](https://vocabifyapp.com)

It's a Chrome extension & web app for highlighting bits you read online. Then
it generates flashcards for you to review on a spaced repetition-type
schedule. No Firefox extension yet, but shouldn't be hard to port over.

Very interesting read, quite impressed with the other experiment proposals.

------
godDLL
What I'd like to see is a Fire-Pixie, a sort of a Rust/Go/Dart or whatever
rewrite that is modular----sorry, has modular support for HTML5/beyond
features that I could enable. Or install. As modules.

With some sane common base of modules, that does not include <video> and
<script> and such. An HTML1/5 base if you will. That is about fifth of what is
in the spec, sorted by common usage among the more traffic-heavy sites on the
Internet, crucially ommiting the annoying and colorful and tracking
functionality altogether.

Do I need to lay this out further? Because, oh boy, I so can do that. For like
16KB right off the top of my head.

------
faitswulff
Sticky reader sounds like a feature users would want and publishers would
hate. TL;DR - pages from certain sites are always displayed in reader mode. Of
course, this would cause havoc with any advertising. That said, I'm all for
it!

~~~
cstuder
iOS has this feature already built into Safari, but it's well hidden: Long-
press the reader icon.

~~~
dgellow
Firefox on iOS also has this feature. Just touch the little paper sheet in the
URL bar.

~~~
_Microft
If the paper sheet icon is not there, prepend _about:reader?url=_ to the url
to activate it manually. It even works most of the time even while Firefox
thinks it can't be used on this page.

------
epitactic
The cloud browser concept is intriguing, as a quick weekend project I whipped
up this simple demo:
[https://gitlab.com/epitactic/cloudbrowser](https://gitlab.com/epitactic/cloudbrowser)
\- using Google Chrome instead of Firefox, but it runs headless on a VPS and
lets you browse most websites. Comments/feedback welcome, I'm trying to get it
posted as a Show HN soon. Here's a live demo on a VPS:
[https://cloudbrowser.website/](https://cloudbrowser.website/)

------
SophosQ
One satisfactory solution that had existed in the early days of Firefox was
the use of group tabs that you could access at a click of a button. They were
an excellent solution that I wish could be reimplemented.

------
WrtCdEvrydy
Change Scout is actually one of the basic reasons to deploy Huggin... so you
can monitor pages for changes and get emails.

------
air7
Shameless plug: I made a FireFox extension called Check4Change which, well,
you can probably guess...

------
Ygg2
I could be the minority here, but I really enjoy the Pocket recommendation I
find in my Mobile Firefox. I'd like for Desktop Firefox to show them as well,
as well as sinking, so I get the same recommendations on both mobile and
desktop.

------
mcbutterbunz
I wish I could get adjustable windows in Firefox. I spend a lot of time in a
browser and I have a very large monitor. With one OS window to alt-tab through
but multiple pages open at the same time, that would be killer.

~~~
ww520
The add-on Tip Tab [1] has a view to show all tabs of all windows, and let you
use the TAB key to cycle through all of them, with the RETURN key to activate
the current tab. So you can have multiple windows open with different sizes at
different locations of the screen, and still be able to cycle through them.
Not sure whether that would help.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-
tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/). (shameless
plug for my add-on)

------
owaislone
I was hoping to see them give Ubiquity one more shot as part of the
experiments.

------
Joyfield
I would like for FF to remember the volume...

------
huxflux
Am I the only one who still keeping Opera installed because it can pop-out
video into a new window?

------
ceiphr
The "My Homepage" experiment sounds like a decentralized social platform
right?

------
GuillaumeBrdet
This is really cool and well presented! Lots of interesting ideas as well.

------
iamaelephant
Maybe Firefox could "Experiment" with making trackpad pinch to zoom work like
every other browser first.

------
zcwbz
Test Pilot is closing? Does that mean that the Mozilla Corporation no longer
has a backdoor in Firefox through which they can install plugins in the same
way they installed the Mr. Robot advertisement plugin some time ago?
[https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-
robo...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-
plugin-firefox-looking-glass)

~~~
gboudrias
Holy crap, I don't remember hearing about this. Yeah I'd rather not have that.
Reminds me of the Ubuntu hubris and their built-in ads.

You just have to wonder what it is that makes big open-source companies so
disconnected from their userbase. Still better than Google in practice, but
Google's PR is much better.

