Go to content Go to navigation Go to search

What I want in a browser
Tuesday September 2, 2008 by Derek Young

As I’m sure everyone has heard, Google is releasing a new browser. It will be interesting to see how/if it takes off. As a developer it sounds like another headache. At least it’s based on WebKit so it’s not a completely new rendering engine. Seeing the announcement got me to thinking about what I would want in a browser.

  1. Garbage collection — All browsers seem to be filled with memory leaks. No matter how much the developers talk about implementations of malloc that reduce fragmentation and leak fixes they made they still haven’t fixed the problem – keep a browser open for a while and it will use a ton of memory. Because it’s basically impossible to implement a true, compacting garbage collector for a program written in C. This means the browser has to be written from scratch in a different language, an enourmous task. Lobo is written in Java and could be interesting at some point in the future. Maybe it would be possible to write a browser in D.
  2. Total Keyboard support — I would love to see a browser written with the goal of making it possible to use with a keyboard only. Opera has spatial navigation. Browser plugins can be used to select links by typing in an ID that pops up next to each link. These still haven’t gotten to the point where it’s possible or comfortable to navigate with the keyboard. I’m sure 90% of people are more comfortable with a mouse anyway, so I’m not holding my breath on this one.
  3. Speed – browsers still feel slow to me. Obviously some/most of the responsibility is the site you’re browsing. But why do Firefox and Opera still peg the CPU, stutter, or hang on large pages? I have a very fast 8 core machine.

My preferred browser is actually not Firefox but Opera. It’s really designed more as a power user’s browser in my opinion. Plus once you start using mouse gestures you can’t go back. (I find myself using them in apps that don’t support them.) In general it’s closer to meeting my top three requirements but still definitely falls short on all three.

  1. I would like to see Firefox written with D, it would be a good platform to promote D, a better C++, and a good vehicule to attract new programmers or programmers for writing extensions.


    — Dominique De Vito    Sep 8, 10:18 AM    #
  Textile Help